[ANN] New article: Why fonts keep loading

[Beth Rosengard]

The following new article has been posted in the MacWord section of the
word.mvps.org site. Please note that if you use Safari to access this site,
you'll have to hit Refresh once or twice for each page you load. You're
best off using Firefox, IE or another browser.

"Why your Office 2004 fonts want to keep loading in OS X"
<http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/WhyFontsKeepLoading.htm>

Thanks to newsgroup poster Jeff Wiseman for a great job of detection and for
writing up his conclusions.

Note: You do not have to be an MVP to contribute to this site. If you have
an article you would like considered, please contact me directly.

--

Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
(If using Safari, hit Refresh once or twice ­ or use another browser.)
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[Ronald Florence]

"Why your Office 2004 fonts want to keep loading in OS X"
<http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/WhyFontsKeepLoading.htm>

Jeff Wiseman's detective job on Office 2004's strange handling of fonts
is interesting and useful. Another and perhaps simpler fix -- if you
have the fonts installed in /Library/Fonts or in a network accessible
directory -- is to delete "Microsoft Office 2004/Office/Do Fonts" before
installing Office. See
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/resour...k/Deployment_Options.xml#control_font_install>

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Ronald,

Very interesting. How did you track down this article, especially since
it's in a Resource Kit for Office X, not Office 2004? Did it turn up on a
MSKB search? If so, using which MS search portal and what search terms?

Thanks for the heads up.

P.S. To Jeff: When you've had a chance to look this over and test it out,
let me know if you'd like to include the info in your article.

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
(If using Safari, hit Refresh once or twice ­ or use another browser.)
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[Jeff Wiseman]

Hi Ronald,

Very interesting. How did you track down this article, especially since
it's in a Resource Kit for Office X, not Office 2004? Did it turn up on a
MSKB search? If so, using which MS search portal and what search terms?

Thanks for the heads up.

P.S. To Jeff: When you've had a chance to look this over and test it out,
let me know if you'd like to include the info in your article.

I may not get a chance to look at this for a bit but I looked at
the article and have a few comments:

1) The article mentioned is dealing with Office v.X and the more
I looked at it, the more I believe there are likely differences
between it and Office 2004 as far as first run behavior goes. For
example, during my testing, I BELIEVE that the Wingdings were
always present, visible, and enabled when I would get first run
installations (remember, they weren't the ones that were
suspicious and my using the .ttf fonts to test with were 100%
repeatable in behavior for the testing I did. I believe that I
was only able to trigger the false font installations by
removing, disabling, or (in most cases) using Font Book to make
the truetype fonts disappear through screwing up the ATS preferences.

Another thing that appears different is the process documented in
that article where if the installing user has write access to the
/Library/Fonts area, the first run would put the fonts there.
It's been a while now, but most of the time I was testing from an
admin account and they were always put into the ~/Library/Fonts
folder for that account as far as I can remember.

2) It appears that the "Do Fonts" file may well be the
application/utility triggered on a first run that actually does
the font install. There is a "Do Fonts" in the Office 2004
installation and if it really does do what the Office v.X version
does, removing it AFTER you've run it once to get your fonts
where you want them might be an alternative. I'd really like to
get the official word from MS as to whether this is legit on
Office 2004 or not before suggesting it.

3) The final bullet in my article on the MVP site is basically
saying the same thing as the last two sentences of the Mactopia
article. If *ALL* of the fonts are missing from the applications
fonts area, they can't be installed.

The article just put up on MVP's website is documented for the
Office 2004 product who's install behaviors does seem to be a bit
different. If the MVP article doesn't make it clear enough that
the testing was specific to Office 2004, then that might need to
be emphasized.

As far as the "Do Fonts" file goes, removing it may be a solution
but my personal view would be that technically you are "breaking"
the installation tools as you are removing part of its
application. Removing the font set after installation is only
mimicing the results of a "no font" custom install and would be a
lesser risk since the installation tools were likely designed to
handle such a configuration. However, this is again based on my
(an outsider's) view. It would certainly be better to have MS
issue a statement of the "proper" way to disable automatic font
installation.

By the way, are ALL of the Office 2004 fonts Truetype fonts? On
my OS 10.3.6 system, all except for the "eccentric" Asian fonts
show up as Font Suitcase files. The Mactopia article says to
create a custom install that does not include fonts, "clear the
check box next to Microsoft TrueType Fonts...in the Custom
install list". If all the Suitcase files were something other
than Truetype, thent he checkbox would only realate to the Asian
fonts.

 

[Ronald Florence]

1) The article mentioned is dealing with Office v.X and the more I
looked at it, the more I believe there are likely differences between it
and Office 2004 as far as first run behavior goes.

The URL I posted was for Office v.X. A similar resource kit for Office
2004 is available at
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downlo...sourceKit.xml&secid=4&ssid=7&flgnosysreq=True>
in a pdf file. The "Microsoft Office 2004/Office/Do Fonts" file
controls the font loading behavior in Office 2004 too, and while the
fonts checked may be different in Office 2004, the fix of deleting that
file still works.

To answer Beth's query of where I found the Microsoft page, I discovered
the fix on my own when I used Office v.X, so I just searched Google for
Office and "Do Fonts". How did I discover the fix? I asked myself why
would the application package would include a zero-length file named "Do
Fonts"? (I initially couldn't believe a programmer would do something
that crude, but reminded myself that we're dealing with Microsoft.)

 

[Jeff Wiseman]

The URL I posted was for Office v.X. A similar resource kit for Office
2004 is available at
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downlo...sourceKit.xml&secid=4&ssid=7&flgnosysreq=True>
in a pdf file. The "Microsoft Office 2004/Office/Do Fonts" file
controls the font loading behavior in Office 2004 too, and while the
fonts checked may be different in Office 2004, the fix of deleting that
file still works.

Downloaded the pdf anc sure enough, the key font is MS Gothic
(different from Office v.X). Also it appears that they've
documented the behavior (page 80) where in Office 2004, a first
time run des not install in /Library/Fonts even if the user has
write access. The strange wording of the text makes it look like
a cut and paste from the Office v.X document or just a mistake.

And yes, it appears that the "recommended" method for inhibiting
the run time installation of fonts is to remove the "Do Fonts"
file which although it appears to be a plugin, isn't

To answer Beth's query of where I found the Microsoft page, I discovered
the fix on my own when I used Office v.X, so I just searched Google for
Office and "Do Fonts". How did I discover the fix? I asked myself why
would the application package would include a zero-length file named "Do
Fonts"? (I initially couldn't believe a programmer would do something
that crude, but reminded myself that we're dealing with Microsoft.)

Ack!I missed that. It's not even an application but a deliberate
flag file for the installer. It's nothing more than another data
point.

Why the devil is all of this installation control information NOT
distributed with the installer so that people can at least know
how to make it work? There's only a few lines of text there.

Grrr.

Well, the issue still remains that the 8 Asian fonts (including
the MS Gothic install flag font) are still ill-behaved on System
10.3.6 anyway and when you try and manipulate them witht eh Font
Book utility, they can foul up the fonts visible in a particular
user's run time environment. And that font is still 7MBs of
wasted storage for most people. At least the "Do Fonts" flag file
is empty.

 

[matt neuburg]

Downloaded the pdf anc sure enough, the key font is MS Gothic
(different from Office v.X)

Then either it's wrong or I'm not understanding the original issue. I do
not have MS Gothic installed - I removed it, along with most of the
other fonts, right after that first Office font dump into my Fonts
folder - but Office has never re-installed all its fonts because of
that. m.

 

[Alan Wood]

By the way, are ALL of the Office 2004 fonts Truetype fonts? On
my OS 10.3.6 system, all except for the "eccentric" Asian fonts
show up as Font Suitcase files. The Mactopia article says to
create a custom install that does not include fonts, "clear the
check box next to Microsoft TrueType Fonts...in the Custom
install list". If all the Suitcase files were something other
than Truetype, thent he checkbox would only realate to the Asian
fonts.

As far as I can tell, the large Asian fonts (e.g. MS Gothic and PMingLiU)
are data-fork OpenType fonts containing TrueType outlines.

At least some of the other Unicode fonts (e.g. Arial and Times New Roman)
are resource-fork TrueType fonts packaged in a suitcase.

 

[Jeff Wiseman]

Then either it's wrong or I'm not understanding the original issue. I do
not have MS Gothic installed - I removed it, along with most of the
other fonts, right after that first Office font dump into my Fonts
folder - but Office has never re-installed all its fonts because of
that. m.

It's only on a first run. The problem that was occurring was that
if you ever have a first run and the fonts were already
supposedly present, they would all re reloaded again anyway, even
thought they are not supposed to.

Scenario:

As an admin, you've just run an Office app for the first time. If
you have Office 2004, it loads all of the fonts into your home
fonts folder. You then copy them all to the /Library/Fonts folder
(Office v.X behaves differently here in that if you have write
access to the /Library/Fonts area, it puts them there
automatically).

Now say another user on your system trys running an office app
for their first time. The run time install is supposed to see
those fonts (or rather see the MS Gothic font for Office 2004
according to the article) and not install any fonts into that
user's local fonts area so that you don't get fonts multiplying
each time a new user trys office for the first time.

Because MS Gothic is an Asian font (and fairly large also), folks
would delete it and others they didn't need. As a result, first
runs would never see what they needed in order to prevent each
user getting a wad of fonts dumped into their home fonts area.

Obviously, the more users on a system, the greater the nuisance.

This could also affect single user systems to a minor extent too.
I'm not sure exactly how a first run condition is detected, but
it appears to be in the Office preferences that exist in the
user's home area. If those preferences are deleted for what ever
reason (they do get corrupt occasionally), a first run can be
triggered. If you had trimmed you system down to a nice 4 or 5
Microsoft fonts that you wanted, you'll now discover that you
have an additional 75 fonts that have been reinstalled.

Anyway, the above is how the system is designed to function.
There is a further complication that the MS Gothic font (and 7
others in the Office 2004 distribution) doesn't get along with
the Font Book utility very well. While manipulating these fonts
in Font Book, they can "disappear" from the system. Effectively
they become disabled and also invisible to the Font Book. Now,
even though the MS Gothic font is physically present in the Fonts
folder, a first run can't see it, and again, you get a dump of
fonts that you weren't expecting.

BTW, this was the issue (i.e., fonts strangely disappearing) I
was trying to track down a couple weeks back when you assisted me
in figuring out how to reset the ATS (fonts) environment for a
user. Once you had helped me figure that out, I was able to more
clearly test for the idiosyncrasies of the Font Book when used
with those Asian fonts.

 

[Jeff Wiseman]

As far as I can tell, the large Asian fonts (e.g. MS Gothic and PMingLiU)
are data-fork OpenType fonts containing TrueType outlines.

At least some of the other Unicode fonts (e.g. Arial and Times New Roman)
are resource-fork TrueType fonts packaged in a suitcase.

Ok, so they are all TrueType fonts and the checkbox would then
imply "all of the fonts" so the documentation correctly matched
the behavior.

 

[matt neuburg]

Thx for the recap - I'm sorry to make you repeat what you said earlier
but it's useful that you did! m.

 

[Jeff Wiseman]

Thx for the recap - I'm sorry to make you repeat what you said earlier
but it's useful that you did! m.

No problem, I repeat myself a lot. I have children


Did you see who's name showed up in the first line of the article?

http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/WhyFontsKeepLoading.htm

The information on how to reset the ATS environment for FONTs
that you gave me made a big difference for me being able to test
the fonts that were giving Font Book so much heartburn. Everytime
something went wrong, I could reset the thing and start again
from a "reasonably" stable point. Really helped as I'm still
blasting through all this OS X stuff trying to come up to speed
but I keep running into apps with truely screwy implementations.

Sometimes it seems that nobody wants to follow the rules of for
quality software engineering.