Font problems in Office 2004 with Tiger

[jeffb996]

After installing Tiger, I have had persistent problems with all Office
applications. At application launch, each program erroneously tells me
that many of my fonts are corrupted and should be removed. It usually
starts with fonts starting with the letter "O" and goes down the entire
list from there. I have validated all of my fonts (approx. 400) with
Font Book and resolved all duplicates. I have also cleaned out the
Office font cache (as suggested in earlier posts), which appeared to
work once, then never again. No other application has any problem with
fonts in Tiger (entire Adobe Creative Suite, among others).

Is there a permanent fix for this problem? Is there an unpublished
limit to the number of fonts Office 2004 can handle? This problem did
not exist with OS X 10.3.6.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

It's a known issue, they are trying to track down the cause, which in one
case was duplicate fonts. The workaround at present appears to be clean out
the system font caches, and try to shut down as little as possible for fear
the problem will return.

You can clean the system font caches by doing a safe boot or using a number
of various utilities. You will see much discussion about methods and the
problem in several threads on the Word group:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/microsoft.public.mac.office.word/search?
group=microsoft.public.mac.office.word&q=tiger+font&qt_g=1&searchnow=Search+
this+group

What type of Tiger installation did you do? Simple upgrade, Archive and
Install, Erase and Install?

 

[jeffb996]

My install was a simple upgrade. No need for anything more elaborate,
since my machine is a Dual 2 Ghz G5 that came with OS X 10.3. If it
was an older machine or a G4 that had had many iterative OS upgrades, I
would have done an archive and install. My experience with Macs goes
back 20 years and I know (at least, I think I know) when to wipe the
slate completely clean before an OS upgrade.

Having gone through a few episodes of clicking the OK box a couple
hundred times to dismiss the erroneous corrupt font dialog, it dawned
on me that there's no correlation between fonts that had duplicates and
those that did not when Word is telling me there's a bunch of corrupt
ones. Many of the fonts now deemed to be corrupt never had a
duplicate, while a few others did. Since the trouble starts some
distance down the font list alphabetically and the font pulldown in
Word displays them alphabetically, could it be a problem, not with the
sheer number of fonts, but simply accounting for them all when Word
launches? Wouldn't be the first time that a program tripped on it's
shoelaces because it couldn't keep track of a bunch of pointers as they
flew by. A clue?

 

[Guest]

Just for kicks, have you tried clearing the OS font cache using the
steps on p. 26 of
http://images.apple.com/pro/pdf/L303878B_Font_TT_v4.pdf?

Please do post whether or not this fixes your problem.

 

[jeffb996]

Sorry that it took a few days to get around to trying this...

Deleting the Mac OS X font caches had no effect. I copied the three
files that the manual indicated were in /System/Library/Caches to the
Desktop and deleted the copies in the folder. The files com.apple.ATS
and com.apple.ATS.plist were nowhere to be found. I restarted, then
launched MS Word. It did not give me the long list of dialog boxes
about "corrupted" fonts, but the Font pulldown still contains the
abbreviated font list as before (stops at the "N's"). Word, Excel and
PowerPoint run OK otherwise. In fact, I have not had the "corrupt
font" dialog box exercise since I last deleted the Office font cache
and then had to dismiss all of the erroneous "corrupt font" dialogs the
next time I launched Word. At the moment, Office does not seem to care
about "corrupt" fonts after one has answered the dialogs, it only
presents an abbreviated font list, missing the fonts previously deemed
corrupt. For now, I can live with that workaround, but if I need more
fonts for something, I'll have to delete the Office font cache and then
do the dialog dance.

Users/my account/Library/Fonts does contain all of the fonts (262
files) that should be there and Font Book still correctly lists all 399
of my fonts (multiple type faces in many of the font files is the delta
between 262 files and 399 fonts).

Also, restarting did not create new copies of the OS X System font
caches, but everthing seems to run all right (at least, so far).

 

[New User]

Safe Start reboot worked for me. I took advantage of the opportunity to
disable "WYSIWYG" font display in the Word prefs menu, as well disabling
as Project Galleries in Excel and Word. Since then I've booted Photoshop
CS, which has a font optimization routine as well. We'll see if the MS
Office font optimization problem reasserts itself.

 

[jeffb996]

Hey, it looks like that did it. (At least for now.) After the Safe
Boot and turning off the font WYSIWYG option, I did a standard restart
and all of my fonts now appear on the lists in Word, Excel and
PowerPoint and no long list of "corrupted font" dialog boxes. Since I
now have a much better workaround, I may try turning the font WYSIWYG
option back on later and see if that triggers the problem again. (Not
today, though. I want to savor the victory for a while.) Thanks for
the tip.

 

[ethan]

I followed the steps above and it temporarily solved the problem but
now it's back. I'm thinking about reinstalling Office X, as Office
2004 is unusable.

 

[New User]

I followed the steps above and it temporarily solved the problem but
now it's back. I'm thinking about reinstalling Office X, as Office
2004 is unusable.

I've had recurring problems with the Office2004 font optimization bug
after opening any AdobeCS application. It's gotten the the point that I
avoid booting any Office2004 app. Today, because I have to edit a
PowerPoint doc, I'm going to try closing unused fonts in FontBook and
rebooting using safe start. I anticipate some pain: I have to edit files
in PhotoshopCS to drop into the PowerPoint; switching back and forth
from Adobe and MS apps could be a drag.

 

[Andrew Foster]

I've had recurring problems with the Office2004 font optimization bug
after opening any AdobeCS application. It's gotten the the point that I
avoid booting any Office2004 app. Today, because I have to edit a
PowerPoint doc, I'm going to try closing unused fonts in FontBook and
rebooting using safe start. I anticipate some pain: I have to edit files
in PhotoshopCS to drop into the PowerPoint; switching back and forth
from Adobe and MS apps could be a drag.

Hello,

I can't even boot any of my Microsoft Office 2004 applications because
of the font corruption problems.

Tried the Tiger Cache Cleaner with a deep clean. The programs worked
for one sitting. After quitting and re-starting them later (not
rebooting),
they no longer work.

Useless for a $400 investment. Very very frustrating.

C