Corrupted Fonts

[simcam]

My computer runs on Mac OS X 10.4.2 Tiger. All was working well, until
one fine day, when I tried to open an Office Application, I started
getting messages that I had corrupted fonts, and that I had to remove
the font. There were many affected fonts. Please can you help?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

You've got the "All fonts reported as corrupted under Tiger" problem. Lots
of discussion on it on the MacWord newsgroup, so search the archives there.
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.mac.office.word

It's a corruption in the font cache, rather than of the fonts themselves.

Recent posts will have a standard recommendation from Beth Rosengard.

 

[simcam]

Thank you Daiya. That solved my problem.

Simon Camilleri

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Glad to hear it. That one's been a little intractable--I fear it may
return.

 

[Loren]

You've got the "All fonts reported as corrupted under Tiger" problem. Lots
of discussion on it on the MacWord newsgroup, so search the archives there.
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.mac.office.word

It's a corruption in the font cache, rather than of the fonts themselves.

Recent posts will have a standard recommendation from Beth Rosengard.

Daiya,

can someone repost Beth Rosengard's standard recommendation? I've
searched the google archive and can find plenty of posts by Beth, but
not sort of definitive statement.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

It's a corruption in the font cache, rather than of the fonts themselves.

Daiya,

can someone repost Beth Rosengard's standard recommendation? I've
searched the google archive and can find plenty of posts by Beth, but
not sort of definitive statement.

Yeah, actually, I'm not real sure what it is myself, I eventually gave up on
those threads. I think it's what you said in your other post--clean the
caches and restart. There was never a definitive statement, just a standard
list of things to check, I think.

Also, check for duplicate fonts, and see this subject line " In Tiger Word
2004 may hang on launch if font duplicates are loaded" on the word group.

See also this thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.mac.office.word/browse_frm/t
hread/b873cf8b3abaada2/4fe47a6abe026dca

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

On 2005-09-20 20:10:40 -0400, Daiya Mitchell

Thanks Daiya. My issue isn't hanging on launch,

What, Loren, you've never heard of thread drift and bad subject lines? Beth
lists a bunch of specific files to test in that thread, just what you are
asking for.

Anyway, yeah Tiger Cache Cleaner works. But it would be nicer just to
remove the relavent cache files, not obnibus every cach file in the
system when this happens. I've seen various posts about this but would
be interested in a definitive statement about which caches have to be
removed.

No one has a definitive statement, because we don't know what causes the
problem. Not everyone sees it, not even everyone on Tiger. A number of
people maintaining multiple computers on Tiger have not seen it. It is
clearly due to some sort of interaction with the OS, because it never came
up on Panther, but I have no idea whether the problem is with MS or with
Apple, and I have no idea whether anyone at the MacBU has tracked it down
either. Problems that *don't'* strike everyone are the hardest to track
down.

 

[Loren]

No one has a definitive statement, because we don't know what causes the
problem. Not everyone sees it, not even everyone on Tiger. A number of
people maintaining multiple computers on Tiger have not seen it. It is
clearly due to some sort of interaction with the OS, because it never came
up on Panther, but I have no idea whether the problem is with MS or with
Apple, and I have no idea whether anyone at the MacBU has tracked it down
either. Problems that *don't'* strike everyone are the hardest to track
down.

Daiya,

Thanks again for your helpful contributions here.

May I say that I'm not much of a programmer. But I know enough to know
that Word puts up a dialog that says <font x> is corrupt. that means
it has a check to see if font x is corrupt. look at the bloody routine
that does that check and figure out why that check might be DEAD WRONG
on a Tiger system. If the genius microsoft programmers can't figure it
out, then build in an "ignore this font" option, and only list fonts
that it thinks are not corrupt and ignore the bloody rest. Not too
hard.

 

[Loren]

On 2005-09-21 00:35:24 -0400, Daiya Mitchell
<[email protected]> said:

Oh and one more thing.... with the number of users reporting this
problem, if it can't be reproduced in house, how bout asking some users
to send an archive of /Library/Cache/ or whatever directory has the
corrupted fonts to the MBU team. I'm sorry for the agitated tone, but
heck I'm agitated. It's unbelievable to me that it's such a puzzle to
figure out. Or maybe it isn't, maybe the attitude over at MBU is more
like Corentin's, ie duh, what problem.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

No one has a definitive statement, because we don't know what causes the

Daiya,

Thanks again for your helpful contributions here.

May I say that I'm not much of a programmer. But I know enough to know
that Word puts up a dialog that says <font x> is corrupt. that means
it has a check to see if font x is corrupt. look at the bloody routine
that does that check and figure out why that check might be DEAD WRONG
on a Tiger system. If the genius microsoft programmers can't figure it
out, then build in an "ignore this font" option, and only list fonts
that it thinks are not corrupt and ignore the bloody rest. Not too
hard.

Hi Loren,

I don't know much about programming either, but the way I see it:

The root of the problem is not the check that comes back as corrupt, nor
even the corrupt cache, but whatever process corrupts the cache so that it
reports a wrong answer. It's that process that needs to be tracked down,
and that's about interaction with the OS, and happens *before* ever the
check is made, I'm guessing.

Again, the check does not come back wrong on all Tiger systems, only some,
which is what makes me think the problem is not in the process of checking,
but somewhere else.

A workaround for this, as you say, would be to build in an "ignore this
font" option. Since the way Word deals with fonts is so complicated, I'm
guessing that would involve some deep structural changes that are beyond the
scope of an update. Many people asked if they could turn off "optimizing
font menu", which would prevent the corrupt font messages. I'm thinking
that's coded in Word at a pretty low level, since it's part of the startup
routine.

Daiya

 

[Loren]

Hi Loren,

I don't know much about programming either, but the way I see it:

The root of the problem is not the check that comes back as corrupt, nor
even the corrupt cache, but whatever process corrupts the cache so that it
reports a wrong answer. It's that process that needs to be tracked down,
and that's about interaction with the OS, and happens *before* ever the
check is made, I'm guessing.

Again, the check does not come back wrong on all Tiger systems, only some,
which is what makes me think the problem is not in the process of checking,
but somewhere else.

A workaround for this, as you say, would be to build in an "ignore this
font" option. Since the way Word deals with fonts is so complicated, I'm
guessing that would involve some deep structural changes that are beyond the
scope of an update. Many people asked if they could turn off "optimizing
font menu", which would prevent the corrupt font messages. I'm thinking
that's coded in Word at a pretty low level, since it's part of the startup
routine.

Daiya

Daiya,

Thanks again for the thoughtful response. But I'm guessing it's mostly
nonsense. (No offence to you personally, as I do believe you either
don't know any better or have been told by whoever you talk to at MS
that Office is "very complicated" and that it interacts with OS X in an
arcane and totally unaccessable technical way and so forth, basically
transforming the corporate politics between apple and ms into a problem
of programming.)

First, I don't think there's anything that really corrupts the font
cache, because no other application nor the operating system has any
problems. The cache just gets corrupted as far as word is concerned.
And yes, something must happen for that, but something that Office
should be able to gracefully handle. Putting up an endless series of
dialogs for each so-called corrupt font is no way to handle it.

Now then, if you have the patience and the time to sit though 100
dialogs and press ok for each (which I have done and which takes about
20 mins on my system), word works just fine once it finally starts up.
So in effect it is already ignoring the so-called corrupt fonts.

Coding the dialog box is most certainly NOT at a "low level". It would
be a matter of changing the logic (to use AppleScript) from:

set corrupt_check to check_corruption(this_font)
if corrupt_check is true then
display dialog (name of this_font) is corrupt with button {"OK"}
else
copy this_font to optimized_menu_list
end if

to:

set corrupt_check to check_corruption(this_font)
if corrupt_check is false then copy this_font to optimized_menu_list

Now as to the way word deals with fonts being so "complicated" that
this would involve "deep structural changes" and so forth, that's
nonsense too. No matter how "low level" this mysterious "way" is, at
some point a program keeps a list. Lists, also known as arrays, are
low level programming objects, and even the most low level assembly
language has some way of dealing with lists. It's a matter of NOT
ADDING items (in this case fonts thought to be corrupt) to this
list/array during the check sequence without unnecessary user
intervention.

Now thankfully, Office is not written in assembly language. It is, I'm
guessing, written in C+, but at least some common high level language.
Which means the source code has identifiable and commented
(sub)routines, and one that deals with checking for corrupt fonts.
That code has to be fixed, probably with a few lines. (Since the fonts
aren't actually corrupt, word just thinks they are. I mean duplicate
fonts for chrissake?? come on, again it's a matter of not adding a
dupliate to the list of good fonts But I'm just restating the point
here.)

Anyway, once fixed in the high-level source code, the source is
recompiled. Any change to the source code, from the most superficial
change to the most major, requires a total recompile, as it does with
all coding environments. There's nothing so deep that it is beyond
anyone familiar with the source code. The line of argument you're
pushing is just a kind of obfuscation that tech geeks like to push on
every day computer users: make it seem so technical that a fix is
either impossible or will cost you hundreds of dollars an hour in
consulting fees.

Believe me, it's not. It's just bad programming combined with lazy
programmers, shielded by an army of apologists and a wall of corporate
silence.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Daiya,

The line of argument you're
pushing is just a kind of obfuscation that tech geeks like to push on
every day computer users: make it seem so technical that a fix is
either impossible or will cost you hundreds of dollars an hour in
consulting fees.

As I said, I'm not a tech geek nor an expert in programming, and those were
my guesses.

Daiya

 

[Loren]

As I said, I'm not a tech geek nor an expert in programming, and those were
my guesses.

Daiya

I understand Diaya, and I think you for your time and your help. I
just hope some people at MS see this thread and get embarrassed enough
to fix the issue already.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Oh and one more thing.... with the number of users reporting this
problem, if it can't be reproduced in house, how bout asking some users
to send an archive of /Library/Cache/ or whatever directory has the
corrupted fonts to the MBU team.

The problem is that as far as the System cache are concerned, these
cache files can be quite large (and of course proportional to the number
of fonts used in the system). Beside that, I'm not sure that the
corrupted font cache can reveal much about what causes the corruption.
System Font cache are located in /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS (there
are different subfolders specific to different users and to the system
itself there).
I don't have too many fonts, and my folder is already over 10MB.

I'm sorry for the agitated tone, but
heck I'm agitated. It's unbelievable to me that it's such a puzzle to
figure out. Or maybe it isn't, maybe the attitude over at MBU is more
like Corentin's, ie duh, what problem.

Loren, please read my post in the other group. I believe you
misunderstood my original question (most probably my fault) and this is
all base on a misunderstading.

Corentin

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

First, I don't think there's anything that really corrupts the font
cache, because no other application nor the operating system has any
problems.

The problem is 1) not all portions of the cache are accessed by all
programs, 2) other apps might deal better with font cache corruption and
not crash but simply ignore the issue (it'd be nice if Office could do
that) or behave in a different way (display glitches on the screen,
generate werid outputs in the printer) and finally 3) You might see
other apps crash once ina while because of font cache and never
attribute it to font cache corruption.

I believe the cache is indeed corrupt. Maybo not so badly all apps would
crash, but enough to affect Office :-\

Corentin

 

[Loren]

The problem is that as far as the System cache are concerned, these
cache files can be quite large (and of course proportional to the number
of fonts used in the system). Beside that, I'm not sure that the
corrupted font cache can reveal much about what causes the corruption.

Uh, why would you think they wouldn't? It's simple logic. If
clearing out those caches (temporarily) makes the problem go away, then
the problem is there. Again its probably not what causes corruption
but what makes Office think there is corruption when there isn't.

I did see your other post about other apps handling it better /
ignoring it/ showing glitches, and i take that as a possibility.
However in any case these files would show what is "corrupt" and
comparison to "non-corrupt" cache files would be instructive if anyone
in MS development bothered to look.

System Font cache are located in /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS (there
are different subfolders specific to different users and to the system
itself there).
I don't have too many fonts, and my folder is already over 10MB.

So what? So what if it's 5 Gig? It's a DVD worth at most that could
be sent by priority mail to Redmond for $3. Probably more like a CD
which could be uploaded overnight to MS servers on any decent high
speed ISP.

Loren, please read my post in the other group. I believe you
misunderstood my original question (most probably my fault) and this is
all base on a misunderstading.

I responded already, and I take the point. But the statement above
reveals to me it's not just a problem of language abruptness. You're
just somehow more interested in users dealing with the problems MS
creates than helping to get MS to fix its problems.

Enough said. I gotta get some work done.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Uh, why would you think they wouldn't? It's simple logic. If
clearing out those caches (temporarily) makes the problem go away, then
the problem is there. Again its probably not what causes corruption
but what makes Office think there is corruption when there isn't.

Well seing that the file is corrupted doesn't tell you what application
corrupted it :-\ The system cerates these cache files to speed up font
loading for all applications. I'm not sure it clears them so often and
it's also not up to the third party apps to clear these cache files
either. It's a task restricted to the system as far as I remember.

I did see your other post about other apps handling it better /
ignoring it/ showing glitches, and i take that as a possibility.

Yeah, additionally not all apps support all font types so not all apps
would need to access all the font cache files.

However in any case these files would show what is "corrupt" and
comparison to "non-corrupt" cache files would be instructive if anyone
in MS development bothered to look.

Well if I find the windshield of my car smashed and compare it to an
intact one, it still doesn't tell me who smashed my windshield :-\ But
it is true it could be informative.
I don't doubt for a moment Apple is working on that.

So what? So what if it's 5 Gig? It's a DVD worth at most that could
be sent by priority mail to Redmond for $3. Probably more like a CD
which could be uploaded overnight to MS servers on any decent high
speed ISP.

True.


Corentin

 

[Nathan Herring [MSFT]]

As far as I can tell, your argument is correct about how to produce a new
build that may fix a problem (assuming the programmer understands the real
reasons underlying the problem).

Unfortunately, it does not account for the vast quantity of testing to make
sure that we're not introducing some other such problem, and even then, we
still produce products for which the full set of in-house testers, in-house
dogfooders, and external beta users do not see a particular bug that an
individual end-user (or set of them) do see. A fix to your problem might
cause problems for some other (possibly overlapping) set of users.

-nh

 

[Nathan Herring [MSFT]]

Uh, why would you think they wouldn't? It's simple logic. If
clearing out those caches (temporarily) makes the problem go away, then
the problem is there. Again its probably not what causes corruption
but what makes Office think there is corruption when there isn't.

I did see your other post about other apps handling it better /
ignoring it/ showing glitches, and i take that as a possibility.
However in any case these files would show what is "corrupt" and
comparison to "non-corrupt" cache files would be instructive if anyone
in MS development bothered to look.

They are not our files. They're Apple system files. Apple could tell us the
format, and tell us whether they're corrupt. AFAIK, MS products never use
those caches directly, but through the OS Toolbox, which is responsible for
maintaining them.

So what? So what if it's 5 Gig? It's a DVD worth at most that could
be sent by priority mail to Redmond for $3. Probably more like a CD
which could be uploaded overnight to MS servers on any decent high
speed ISP.

True. And the corruption may even point to a particular culprit, and that
culprit may even be Microsoft Office. But, performing forensic analysis on a
corrupt file is not necessarily easy and may give no good indications.

What is needed by us and/or Apple is a reproduction case. You have one. We
do not, again, AFAIK; one of our testers might know more than I.

Information about your particular setup, and the setup of other folks who
are experiencing the problem would be useful. Things like:
* Specific OS version
* Hardware -- G4/G5? Memory? HD, partitions, formatted as? External media?
* What fonts you have installed and where? Can the problem be narrowed down
to "only happens when these specific fonts are installed"?
* Do you have any font manipulation software installed?
* What applications or utilities are always running (background
applications, etc.)
* Is it specific to the system cache files you've mentioned? i.e., when you
experience the problem and try to recover (for the few minutes you can do
so), what are the minimum number of cache files you can delete and be able
to work?

This would aid us much more than vitriol. If you've already provided these
on another thread (seeing as I generally only read .mac.office and
..mac.office.entourage), a specific reference, e.g., a Google groups URL to
the post, would be handy.

I responded already, and I take the point. But the statement above
reveals to me it's not just a problem of language abruptness. You're
just somehow more interested in users dealing with the problems MS
creates than helping to get MS to fix its problems.

I honestly believe our MVPS are interested in trying to help users figure
out how our programs can do what they want to do, as well as help users work
around problems that exist with our programs until a fix is forthcoming.
They can only report the problems to Microsoft that they hear, and cannot be
held responsible for fixing those problems themselves.

That's our job. And sometimes, our job is to figure out that the bug isn't
ours and send it to Apple or a 3rd party. (And the reverse holds true as
well.)

-nh

 

[Loren]

On 2005-09-21 17:31:32 -0400, "Nathan Herring [MSFT]"
<[email protected]> said:

Nathan,

Thank you very much for piping in here. I do appreciate it. And I'm
sure others who have this problem do as well. I don't mean to harp on
the MVP, they provide a valuable service normally. However, when they
just defend your products when there is obviously a problem with them,
it is upsetting and they just look stupid.

I am sure anyone would be happy to give you all the info you needed if
you requested it. But I haven't seen such a request for 6 months of
hundreds of people having this problem and posting here. And please
don't tell me its not obvious that people are having it, or argue about
how many, or how representative the posts here are, etc, etc, because
then I wouldn't know what to say. I think it was quite obvious since
the day Tiger was released that this is a problem.

They are not our files. They're Apple system files. Apple could tell us the
format, and tell us whether they're corrupt. AFAIK, MS products never use
those caches directly, but through the OS Toolbox, which is responsible for
maintaining them.

Please see the other posts in these usenet groups. I've said enough
about it already, as have others. The point is it is only Office that
is reporting these so-called "corrupt" fonts. And even if Office
somehow knows better, or does better checks, than any other application
on my system, it's still just plain bad interface design that a dialog
box should have to be put up for every single font it erroneously
thinks is corrupt. Just ignore them. Then if necessary sort it out
later, or just log the fonts that it thinks (probably wrongly) are
"corrupt".

What is needed by us and/or Apple is a reproduction case. You have one. We
do not, again, AFAIK; one of our testers might know more than I.

Hard to believe. But OK, I can sort of accept that. But see above on
not making any effort to seek info beyond your closed group.

Information about your particular setup, and the setup of other folks who
are experiencing the problem would be useful. Things like:
* Specific OS version

This happened since upgrade to Tiger. And has persisted since, up
through current OS X 10.4.2

* Hardware -- G4/G5?

Dual 1.8 G5

Memory?

Had 1 Gig when first started, now 2 Gig

HD, partitions, formatted as?

Internal drive formatted into 3 partitions, boot volume about 80 Gig
with 42 gig free.

External media?

Several external firewire drives and one USB 2.0 drive

* What fonts you have installed and where?

I have not installed any excessively special fonts. I may at some
point way back when -- Jaguar or such -- installed some fonts from a
commercial font pacage. But basically I'm not a big font user. There
are no doubt hold overs from OS 9 (clasic).

Can the problem be narrowed down
to "only happens when these specific fonts are installed"?

No idea. I don't install or uninstall fonts normally.

* Do you have any font manipulation software installed?

I have some font clean up stuff like Font Finangler, but I don't use
any font management programs, not even Font Book.

* What applications or utilities are always running (background
applications, etc.)

Plenty. Probably too many to list. right now open: address book,
quickeys 3, lauch bar 4, safari, url manager pro, speed download 3,
terminal, web confidential, unison, entourage, itunes, media rage,
preview, text edit, system prefs, print monitor, quicktime player, jbid
watcher, isilo. background also includes software connected to missing
sync, default folder, geek tool, growl, stuffit, meridian, pod2go, blue
phone elite, timbuktu, change desktop, you control, tech tool pro.

* Is it specific to the system cache files you've mentioned? i.e., when you
experience the problem and try to recover (for the few minutes you can do
so), what are the minimum number of cache files you can delete and be able
to work?

I don't know. I just do a blanket deep clean with Tiger Cache Cleaner
of all user and system cache files. This works for others too. And I
can recover for more than a few minutes. It works for a while --
several launches or several days -- and then recurs.

That's our job. And sometimes, our job is to figure out that the bug isn't
ours and send it to Apple or a 3rd party. (And the reverse holds true as
well.)

Well please do it already.

Thank you.