Font book Vs. Word

[rowdybarber]

Foolish act #1 was installing 983 shiny new fonts along with upgradin
to Tiger. Assumed the "disable" feature in Font Book 2 would grant mor
control, ease of use and management of all these wonderful fonts. So wh
not dop on tons of fun fonts?

Instead: fonts cause major drag + lag on apps like Adobe PDF an
Microsoft Word.

First I went through and painstakingly used font book to disable abou
750 fonts, taking great care not to shut down any system fonts eve
when they were stuff I never use, such as Chinese characters.

I restarted, relaunched Word, and...(you knew it was coming)...sam
problem. Waiting forever for fonts to optimize, and the endles
pulldown font menus once the app finally loaded.

Ransacking a few mac/font issues forums, I found this workaround, whic
was supposed to work but thus far hasn't:

-start in safe mode
-log in
-log out
-restart normal
-log in

The above steps were supposed to enable all fonts.

At which point, I created a new font collection called 'disabled fonts
and, again, moved about 90% of my fonts (non-system fonts) into th
disabled fonts collection.
-control click 'disable Disabled Fonts'

Word still loads 983 fonts, which takes forever and the pulldown fon
menu/formatting pallate are, well, 983 fonts deep.

Any thoughts on how to streamline this? I've decided F all these fonts
I don't need 1,000 fonts on my computer. How can I quickly, cleanly an
concisely deactivate or remove them, but leave my system fonts in plac
so everything runs smooth and returns to the revered state of 'as it wa
before'?


-R

 

[Kurt]

Foolish act #1 was installing 983 shiny new fonts along with upgrading
to Tiger. Assumed the "disable" feature in Font Book 2 would grant more
control, ease of use and management of all these wonderful fonts. So why
not dop on tons of fun fonts?

Instead: fonts cause major drag + lag on apps like Adobe PDF and
Microsoft Word.

First I went through and painstakingly used font book to disable about
750 fonts, taking great care not to shut down any system fonts even
when they were stuff I never use, such as Chinese characters.

I restarted, relaunched Word, and...(you knew it was coming)...same
problem. Waiting forever for fonts to optimize, and the endless
pulldown font menus once the app finally loaded.

Ransacking a few mac/font issues forums, I found this workaround, which
was supposed to work but thus far hasn't:

-start in safe mode
-log in
-log out
-restart normal
-log in

The above steps were supposed to enable all fonts.

At which point, I created a new font collection called 'disabled fonts'
and, again, moved about 90% of my fonts (non-system fonts) into the
disabled fonts collection.
-control click 'disable Disabled Fonts'

Word still loads 983 fonts, which takes forever and the pulldown font
menu/formatting pallate are, well, 983 fonts deep.

Any thoughts on how to streamline this? I've decided F all these fonts,
I don't need 1,000 fonts on my computer. How can I quickly, cleanly and
concisely deactivate or remove them, but leave my system fonts in place
so everything runs smooth and returns to the revered state of 'as it was
before'?


-RB

I would use a better font management program like FontAgent, that makes
copies of all your fonts (except system fonts) and allows you to more
easily enable or disable the ones you need or don't need.
Much better than Suitcase or FontReserve (both extensis products)

As understand it, Font Book actually physically moves the fonts around
to do this.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

We haven't come close to solving the Font issues in Tiger yet. Some people
get them, some don't, and I don't know why. Apple does, but it's not
saying. Microsoft does, but they're not saying...

In the meantime, assume that Tiger will find fonts wherever they are. You
might try ensuring that there are fewer than 500 fonts anywhere on your
system. Burn the rest to CD and remove it

Then power-off reboot to force all the various font caches to rebuild. I
would also DISABLE any font manager(s) you may be running.

No guarantees, but you may find normal service is resumed.

We're waiting on fixes for these issues: but I do not know which company is
going to issue them: I think it's both.

Cheers

Foolish act #1 was installing 983 shiny new fonts along with upgrading
to Tiger. Assumed the "disable" feature in Font Book 2 would grant more
control, ease of use and management of all these wonderful fonts. So why
not dop on tons of fun fonts?

Instead: fonts cause major drag + lag on apps like Adobe PDF and
Microsoft Word.

First I went through and painstakingly used font book to disable about
750 fonts, taking great care not to shut down any system fonts even
when they were stuff I never use, such as Chinese characters.

I restarted, relaunched Word, and...(you knew it was coming)...same
problem. Waiting forever for fonts to optimize, and the endless
pulldown font menus once the app finally loaded.

Ransacking a few mac/font issues forums, I found this workaround, which
was supposed to work but thus far hasn't:

-start in safe mode
-log in
-log out
-restart normal
-log in

The above steps were supposed to enable all fonts.

At which point, I created a new font collection called 'disabled fonts'
and, again, moved about 90% of my fonts (non-system fonts) into the
disabled fonts collection.
-control click 'disable Disabled Fonts'

Word still loads 983 fonts, which takes forever and the pulldown font
menu/formatting pallate are, well, 983 fonts deep.

Any thoughts on how to streamline this? I've decided F all these fonts,
I don't need 1,000 fonts on my computer. How can I quickly, cleanly and
concisely deactivate or remove them, but leave my system fonts in place
so everything runs smooth and returns to the revered state of 'as it was
before'?


-RB

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Pitch]

Good response,John. Thanks.

Is there any way to get Word to only load like 5 fonts? I use InDesign
and other programs for complex layouts, I only need Word for its
outline feature, and for that, I only use about 2 or 3 fonts.

I find Word terribly slow, even with a 2 gig G5 and 2.5 megs of RAM. I
would love to get Word to only see and use a few fonts. Any way to do
that?

 

[Kurt]

Good response,John. Thanks.

Is there any way to get Word to only load like 5 fonts? I use InDesign
and other programs for complex layouts, I only need Word for its
outline feature, and for that, I only use about 2 or 3 fonts.

I find Word terribly slow, even with a 2 gig G5 and 2.5 megs of RAM. I
would love to get Word to only see and use a few fonts. Any way to do
that?

FontAgent.

 

[Elliott Roper]

Good response,John. Thanks.

Is there any way to get Word to only load like 5 fonts? I use InDesign
and other programs for complex layouts, I only need Word for its
outline feature, and for that, I only use about 2 or 3 fonts.

I find Word terribly slow, even with a 2 gig G5 and 2.5 megs of RAM. I
would love to get Word to only see and use a few fonts. Any way to do
that?

Sure.
well maybe.
I started to post a long reply to the effect that having disjoint sets
of fonts in Font Book's collections works for me, but then I noticed it
didn't. Word was making a mess of some incomplete families.
For instance I have only Berkeley Oldstyle Black, yet Word lists 8
variants, of which "Berkeley Black" is the only one that does not
produce an evil pixellated simulcrum.

Other than that, Word (v.X here) now (Tiger 10.4.2) respects the Font
Book settings mostly.
It does not fully recognise Font Book changes like Cocoa apps do. You
have to re-start Word for it to notice additions. It silently ignores
disablement, except for silently refusing to print a document that
contains fonts that have been disabled since it was started, and
displaying them as pixel mud pies with random widths.
My "everday" Font Book collection is a little bloated with 35 families,
compared to 115 in "all fonts"
Word's list has 80-something entries, with none of the disabled fonts
appearing, except for stuff like Geeza from /System/Library/Fonts.
The extra entries occur because it lists every single face e.g. Warnock
Pro is good for 32 lines of Word's brainless font list. It also lists
the extended versions of some fonts e.g. Courier CY, even though it
won't let you select them.

Hint: Tiger's keyboard shortcuts for navigating the menus in every
program work great in Word too. e.g. ^Mfo<sp>l<ret> sets the current
font to Lithos Pro Black (^M is my own remapping, I forget what access
menu bar is by default - where possible I remap function keys to the
main keyboard. Another good trick in Tiger is to remap the caps lock
key to ctrl, so your left pinky does not have to curl up so much.

You might look on Versiontracker for Font Finagler. A new version now
works with Tiger. It cleans up all the system font caches, and I think,
having done so, encourages Word to follow suit (see John's explanation)
It has speeded things up considerably more than once. I really should
register it, but you do get 10 cleans before it stops working.

As others have said, perhaps not in so many words, it is a dog's
breakfast. The addition of half-baked Unicode support does not appear
to have helped in 2004. It is not all Microsoft's fault. Apple have
made a pig's ear of their side of backward compatibility with the old
"Apple Extended" character set.

So you should get and run Font Finagler once, then make all your
collections disjoint in Font Book, disable all but your five family
Word collection and you should be good to go. I'm on a 768MB 1GHz PB
12" and Word is plenty fast enough most of the time. It starts from
scratch in 4.5 seconds. It seldom gets behind my typing (no great
achivement) and apart from sometimes taking a second to catch up
repaginating after a style change it is perfectly usable in page layout
mode. I do have every damn toolbar turned off and I have disabled as
much bloat as I can, like rulers and scroll bars, word and character
counts and the rest of the silly nonsense that decorates the bottom of
the active window. I do everything possible with keyboard shortcuts. I
reckon on making about 10 mouseclicks per hour.