Font Problems

[Brian]

I've seen numerous posts about alleged font problems in Office X for
Mac causing Office to crash. Most of the suggestions and the official
suggestion from MS is to check your fonts.

I've done that, with 2 seperate font checking programs (FontDoctor and
Extensis). Both found the fonts on my system to be fine.

But Office still shuts down. No other application has any problems, just
Office. I've tried restarting, removing the Office font cache, etc... with
no luck.

MS's suggestion to go font by font to find the problem is completely
unworkable, since it seems once Office crashes, you have to restart to
check it again.. even if you make changes to the font folder or remove
the fonts in question.

Why does Office have to check fonts in the first place? And if it does
have to, why can't it simply tell you what it is choking on instead of tell
you to search through hundreds and hundreds of fonts one at a time?

Frustrated...

Brian

 

[JE McGimpsey]

I've seen numerous posts about alleged font problems in Office X for
Mac causing Office to crash. Most of the suggestions and the official
suggestion from MS is to check your fonts.

I've done that, with 2 seperate font checking programs (FontDoctor and
Extensis). Both found the fonts on my system to be fine.

But Office still shuts down. No other application has any problems, just
Office. I've tried restarting, removing the Office font cache, etc... with
no luck.

MS's suggestion to go font by font to find the problem is completely
unworkable, since it seems once Office crashes, you have to restart to
check it again.. even if you make changes to the font folder or remove
the fonts in question.

Why does Office have to check fonts in the first place? And if it does
have to, why can't it simply tell you what it is choking on instead of tell
you to search through hundreds and hundreds of fonts one at a time?

Frustrated...

If you're going font-by-font, I'm sure you're frustrated. MS's method at

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=313535&product=macoffx

Is pretty good right up until they say "one at a time". A far more
efficient method is to do a binary search:

Remove half the fonts. Restart, if the problem's gone, put half of
the ones you took away back in; if not, take half the remaining ones out.

Keep dividing the good/bad piles in half until you find the culprit.
Realize that there may be more than one, so it may not be quite so clear
cut. But if you have 128 fonts, this method will find a single bad font
in at most 9 restarts.

As to why Office checks and chokes? No idea.