Geneva Font In EXCEL is a PROBLEM

[Stanley Williams]

In Excel X and 2004 the Geneva Font is not being displayed correctly under
10.5, but was displayed correctly in 10.4. Any way to get this fixed? Does
Apple know about this problem? Thanks.

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Stan -

" not being displayed correctly " leaves a lot to the imagination, but 4
thoughts to offer on the subject without anything more specific to go on:

1- Geneva is primarily a system font which really is as old as the Mac
itself & not very appropriate for user files. If reasonable to do so you
might consider a different sans serif font (such as Lucida Sans) or another
of your choice - although I realize that isn't the preferred solution to the
current problem,

2- Have you updated your printer driver since upgrading to Leopard? If not,
check the mfr's web site for availability,

3- Standard Procedure - Make sure OS X & Office are fully updated,

4- It could be a corrupt font - you can check it out using Font Book.

If these suggestions don't help, please provide a more descriptive
explanation of the problem.

 

[Stanley Williams]

Hi CyberTaz,
Thanks for answering - I have been using Geneva in Excel since 1983, and as
I recall that was the default font in Excel at that time.

I am using Leopard on a Mac Pro. It had Leopard on it when I bought it
(recently). I copied a lot of files from a Mac G4 (it uses Tiger). I have
been keeping check books in spread sheets for a very long time. Under
Leopard the characters appear to be smaller, the hyphens do not fill the
columns as they do on my other two computers (I also have a MacBook Pro that
is also using 10.4), for some text the font is set to shadow and the
presentation is a pour shadow of itself (pun intended), and some of the
dates require a wider column.

I haven't upgraded my printer driver, but then I haven't tried to do any
printing in Excel. Both OS X and Office are fully updated. Font Book doesn't
seem to have a problem with it.

I can use it, but it doesn't look as nice as it does on Tiger.
Once again, Thanks.

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Stanley -

I believe you recall correctly, but cars *used to* come with bias-ply tires,
too Especially if these are files that have been "brought along" from
earlier versions of Excel/Mac OS 9 you may find the following brief but
informative article helpful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_(typeface)

I still think I'm on the right track Especially if the files & your prior
systems were migrated to OS X 10.0 - 10.4 the older versions of Geneva were
brought along and those versions of the OS supported Classic (and Classic
fonts). The newer system doesn't support Classic so the newer (TrueType)
version of Geneva is being substituted for the older bitmap version - hence
the display disparity.

 

[Stanley Williams]

Bob,
You may be on the right track, but on my MacBook Pro (Intel CPU) using
Office X it displays the text in Geneva correctly. It is using Tiger
(10.4.11) and Font Book does say (on all systems) that Geneva is TrueType.
With respect to using TrueType I am using Bookman Old Style (a TrueType font
in Word, and it works just fine. I also tried Geneva in Word and the Shadow
effect is different under Leopard. I think the change is in this graphic
interface and it is broke for Geneva.
I may need to change to a different font, but it will cost me a lot of
hours. Do you think that Apple knows or even cares?
Thanks,

 

[CyberTaz]

Unfortunately I'm not using Leo myself so I can't say for sure. I did some
poking around in Apple Discussions and found reference to some "similar"
issues. If you haven't yet done so you might try reconfiguring the
Appearance settings in System Prefs that have to do with font smoothing.
Perhaps that will give you better results.

You may also want to post an inquiry in the Discussions Forum & see what
comes back:

http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=235

 

[Stanley Williams]

Bob,
I did a silly thing - I opened Excel X in Leopard, opened up one of the
spreadsheets and everything is just fine. Excel 2004 behaves differently
than Excel X and from what I see is downgrade, not an upgrade. Is there a
way MS programmers can be made aware of this issue.

There is another big problem, but I will address that in another posting.
Thanks for the support,
Stan

 

[JE McGimpsey]

I did a silly thing - I opened Excel X in Leopard, opened up one of the
spreadsheets and everything is just fine. Excel 2004 behaves differently
than Excel X and from what I see is downgrade, not an upgrade. Is there a
way MS programmers can be made aware of this issue.

You can always send feedback to MacBU using Help/Feedback from any
Office04 application, which takes you to

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/suggestions.mspx?