Fonts and Word 2004 Questions

[Cygnus X-1]

Last week, I ran a utility called Font Doctor to remove duplicates from my
~/Library/Fonts folder. (I keep most of my fonts in that folder, as per
various ³Best Practices" guides I read.) However, after doing that, Word
2004 would crash right at launch, and Entourage would crash after displaying
an error ³Cannot display function: Not Enough Memory². Oddly, Excel and
PowerPoint worked fine. After replacing my ³organized² Fonts folder with the
previous one restored everything.

What fonts do Word and Entourage REQUIRE to operate? I¹d really like to
clean that folder so I don¹t Œhave so many duplicates, even if they are
deactivated.

Also, I have several hundred fonts, mostly PostScript Type 1, with some
OpenType and a few True Type. For various reasons, the 3rd party font
management apps haven¹t worked for me. But Word seems to handle a large
number of fonts very poorly. It takes several minutes to launch Word (Excel
and PowerPoint launch only marginally slower.) Is there any way to optimize
Word to handle large number of fonts quickly? None of my other applications
suffer from such a degradation in performance.

I deleted the Office Font Cache from the ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft
folder. Since there is little documentation on this, some guidance, tips,
suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated.

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Very interesting! The same thing just happened to me using OS X¹s (10.3.9)
Font Book application. I was going back and forth between an Entourage 2004
post I was writing and Font Book, using the Resolve Duplicates function and
everything was fine until I clicked back into Entourage and the post went
blank with the same ³Not Enough Memory² error that you cited.

The last three fonts whose duplicates I had ³resolved² were Verdana,
Webdings and Wingdings. I re-enabled the dupes for all three, quit and
relaunched Entourage and everything was back to normal. Even the post I had
been writing was sitting intact in the drafts folder.

I have no idea what behind-the-scenes conflicts were operating to make this
happen. I wonder if the problem was that I had Office applications open
while I was disabling fonts. I think I¹ll quit out of them, try again and
see what happens.........

Okay. I quit out of Word and Entourage, disabled the duplicates of those
three fonts, relaunched Word and Entourage and all is well. Try it that way
and see if it makes a difference.

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
MacOffice MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
(If using Safari, hit Refresh once or twice ­ or use another browser.)
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[Cygnus X-1]

Beth,

Did you move those fonts or just disable them?

Did you, by any chance, test Excel or PowerPoint when you disabled those 3
fonts?

I actually moved my fonts, using Font Doctor.

It sounds like Office requires certain fonts, but this is not documented
anywhere ­ even with 3rd party font managers like Suitcase, which recommends
moving fonts out of the ~/Library/Fonts folder.

 

[matt neuburg]

It sounds like Office requires certain fonts, but this is not documented
anywhere

It may not be very well documented by Microsoft, but to say it is not
documented *anywhere* is not accurate, since we have had a great deal of
discussion of this point here (in addition to the suggestions given in
my ebook about Word 2004). Just to sum up my own conclusions, I strongly
recommend leaving in place the Microsoft-installed versions of:

Arial
MS Mincho
MS PGothic
MS PMincho
Tahoma
Times New Roman
Trebuchet
Verdana
Wingdings / 2 / 3

Use Font Book to disable conflicting versions either in /Library or in
Classic.

The only font management software I can come close to recommending,
aside from Font Book which is built in, is Font Agent Pro. It is very
hard for me to believe that you really need "several hundred fonts"
enabled at all times.

After making font changes I recommend clearing both Apple's font caches
(e.g. run Font Finagler) and Microsoft's font cache file and restarting
the computer. m.

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Scott,

(I¹m keeping this on the newsgroup so that others can benefit from/respond
to it.)

I merely disabled them. Are you familiar with the Font Book application in
OS X? If not, take a look at it. It allows you to see where duplicates are
and to ³Resolve Duplicates² from it¹s Edit menu. What it does is disable
the unneeded dupes (which you can manually re-enable if you wish).

No, I did not test any other apps.

Yes, Office *does* require certain fonts. (See Matt Neuburg¹s post.) One
of the Asian fonts, for instance, must be present because its absence is a
signal for Office to re-install the full set of Office fonts in certain
circumstances.

--
***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***

Beth Rosengard
MacOffice MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
(If using Safari, hit Refresh once or twice ­ or use another browser.)
Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[Cygnus X-1]

Matt,

Thanks for the suggestion.

You¹re right ­ I don¹t need to have several hundred fonts active, especially
when working in Word. I¹ve just been too lazy to catalog them. It¹s mostly
when I am in Adobe Creative Suite applications that I want the selection of
fonts.

I bought Font Agent Pro before its Tiger update was released, and was
painfully slow to use. I got the Tiger update, but again, I have not tried
it since. If you have experience with it, I would welcome some advice. I was
going to try to find a freelance Mac expert to help me out, but if you¹ve
got some ideas, I¹d welcome them.

As for the MS-supplied fonts, here¹s what happened:

On the phone is Microsoft support, they asked me to completely uninstall
Office, restart, then install. I did so, and when I launched Word for the
first time, it went through installing those fonts ­ but the same issue
plagued me. And the strange thing is, it still only happened with Word and
Entourage. It even happened with my test OS X user account ­ both Word and
Entourage would crash.

I can understand certain fonts being required, but why then would the same
issue be happening after an re-install? And why Word and Entourage? These
may be rhetorical questions at this point...but I am still left with
duplicate fonts in my folder.

I think this weekend I will try to weed out all the duplicate Type 1 fonts,
and see what happens.

BTW...are you of the opinion that the MS-provided fonts should be in the
/Library/Fonts folder or the ~/Library/Fonts?

Thanks again.