amw said:
Is there any way to stop the annoying delay whilst Word "optimizes the
font menu performance ..."? or do I simply have too many fonts on my
Mac? This has been a persistent problem throughout OSX on both my G5
iMac and now Intel iMac.
It probably is a function of machine speed, number of fonts, how
mangled your various font caches are, and your threshhold of
irritation.
Try the relevant suggestions about clearing your font caches in
http://word.mvps.org/Mac/CorruptFontErrors.html
In the process of checking that advice. I smartened Word's startup on
this 1GHz Powerbook from 20 sec to 4 sec simply by trashing the Office
Font cache. (To make this test fair, I timed the second start before
and after trashing the cache - that way kinda eliminates the difference
due to application swap-outs on this memory starved machine. The first
start after trashing the Office Font Cache was a worrying 2 minutes,
but then I fought down the panic by hoping it was simply doing a cache
rebuild.
I have used Font Finagler in the past to clean out the system font
caches. This time I quit while I was ahead.
I was going to confirm the procedure on my Pro, but it starts Word in 2
sec and never shows me the optimizing message. So how could I test
something that ain't broke?
My general technique for avoiding slow starts in any application is not
to stop 'em in the first place. I'll keep Word and a dozen or so others
running for months on end, usually to terminate on the reboot required
for yet another OS X update. (I make an exception for one or two
otherwise excellent programs that go a bit feral after a while. This
newsreader is one such. On exit, it says it is cleaning up its cache
;-) and beachballs for ever if I don't quit it once every coupla days.)
