In Tiger Word 2004 may hang on launch if font duplicates are loaded

[Guest]

Greetings!

At the suggestion of Beth Rosengard, I am reposting my personal solution
to the following problem in Word 2004 with an easily searchable subject
header.

When I first installed Tiger via Erase and Install (Quicksilver G4/867,
1.5 MB of RAM, large number of volumes mounting regularly), with a
fresh, updated installation of Word 2004 over the top of it, Word
started misbehaving badly. Upon launch it would go into the "optimizing
font menu" operation, then about 2/3 of the way through my font
inventory (around 200 fonts), it would start throwing off font
corruption errors, starting with Romic (an Adobe PS Type 1 font freshly
reinstalled from the original CD). Theses messages would continue, each
requiring that it be dismissed by hand. And the fonts were *not*
corrupt; each was either newly installed by a new program installed
after Tiger (Word 2004, Acrobat, etc.), or was freshly installed from a
verified archive CD. I didn't try other Office 2004 apps.

This was so frustrating that I returned to my cloned backup of Panther,
but for irrelevant reasons, I didn't want to stay thee, so I went back
to Tiger, went to work, and resolved the problem.

In my case, it turned out that I had erroneously installed some Windows
TTF fonts in both Library/Fonts and in ~/Library/Fonts, Upon removing
the duplicate fonts and cleaning out the system and Office font caches
(I used Font Finagler, but there are other options), the problem went
away completely. I did not have to reinstall Tiger, Office, or other
fonts, nor did I have to set up a test user account.

This solution worked for me, and I didn't have to try anything else.
However, Matt Neuberg's advice, offered in this group and elsewhere on
multiple occasions (set up a fresh user account and try Word there, and
if the problem does not occur, simply migrate all your files to that
account), would presumably have solved the problem, because the second
set of duplicate fonts in my original user's font folder would not have
loaded. Additionally, I have read here that Font Book can manage
duplicate fonts, and it would presumably be another way to resolve this
situation. I don't personally use it.

George

P.S. 200 fonts is too many, but I haven't gotten around to weeding them
out yet. In Word I generally set up a custom toolbar which my own font
menu which includes only my everyday fonts, so this expedites things
considerably, even though the regular font menus are way too long.

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Great George. Thanks!

Beth

 

[Jeff Wiseman]

A minor caveat to George's note...


George Nospam wrote:

In my case, it turned out that I had erroneously installed some Windows
TTF fonts in both Library/Fonts and in ~/Library/Fonts, Upon removing
the duplicate fonts and cleaning out the system and Office font caches
(I used Font Finagler, but there are other options), the problem went
away completely. I did not have to reinstall Tiger, Office, or other
fonts, nor did I have to set up a test user account.

This solution worked for me, and I didn't have to try anything else.
However, Matt Neuberg's advice, offered in this group and elsewhere on
multiple occasions (set up a fresh user account and try Word there, and
if the problem does not occur, simply migrate all your files to that
account), would presumably have solved the problem, because the second
set of duplicate fonts in my original user's font folder would not have
loaded. Additionally, I have read here that Font Book can manage
duplicate fonts, and it would presumably be another way to resolve this
situation. I don't personally use it.

The assumption that "the second set of duplicate fonts in my
original user's font folder would not have loaded" may not be
correct. Due to the way Office 2004 for Mac decides whether to
load fonts into the user specific area has been idiosyncratic in
the past. Just because you have Office fonts loaded in
Library/Fonts does NOT necessarily mean that they will not be
loaded into the ~/Library/Fonts area of a new user. Some
information on this can be found in:

http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/WhyFontsKeepLoading.htm

Although I have not started using Tiger yet and am not familiar
with it (I'm still on 10.3.8), I do know that duplicate fonts
(ESPECIALLY certain TTF fonts originated by Microsoft) were
problematic in OS 10.3. The ATS font environment for an
individual user seems to be subject to occasional corruption and
Font Book didn't seem to be real capabile of avoiding it. In
fact, I suspect that part of the problem was Font Book's
inability to deal with certain Microsoft TTF fonts--especially
when they appeared as duplicates. Font book itself could
contribute to the corruption.

Hopefully some of this was corrected in 10.4.

Although the above article is about font installations for
Office, some of the font misbehaviors described in it may be
related to what you've seen, so the article may be of interest to
you.

 

[matt neuburg]

However, Matt Neuberg's advice, offered in this group and elsewhere on
multiple occasions (set up a fresh user account and try Word there, and
if the problem does not occur, simply migrate all your files to that
account), would presumably have solved the problem, because the second
set of duplicate fonts in my original user's font folder would not have
loaded. Additionally, I have read here that Font Book can manage
duplicate fonts, and it would presumably be another way to resolve this
situation.

That is one kind of advice for one kind of situation, but for font
problems I have repeatedly given a different kind of advice:

(1) Use Font Book to find duplicates and other possible problems, and
resolve them (and pare down your active fonts to some reasonable number
if at all possible).

(2) Delete Office's font cache.

(3) Use Font Finagler or safe-boot to get rid of the system font caches.

(4) Restart.

I have fixed problems with Office apps and many other problems by this
simple technique. The other day I had a problem where some apps would
hang when I tried to start them up. Font Book found a duplicate font I
thought I had resolved already; I disabled it and did the other stuff
and all was well again. m.

 

[Liza]

My font problem is 'here
(http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthread.php?t=240114), and I've opte
to take the easy way out after many hours trying to solve it, b
setting up a new user account - all good now!

But my next question is:
Is there a way to delete/remove the main administrator account?
Because that was obviously the account I was working in, and althoug
I've made my new user account an admin one, it's just annoying to hav
the two show up every time (I log on with a password to keep my stuf
safe).

Thanks all

 

[Jeff Wiseman]

My font problem is 'here'
(http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthread.php?t=240114), and I've opted
to take the easy way out after many hours trying to solve it, by
setting up a new user account - all good now!

But my next question is:
Is there a way to delete/remove the main administrator account?
Because that was obviously the account I was working in, and although
I've made my new user account an admin one, it's just annoying to have
the two show up every time (I log on with a password to keep my stuff
safe).

Thanks all.

From your new admin account, go to the system prefs-> accounts
window and delete the other account (select and use the "-"
button. Dumb, I know. Why isn't there a "remove" or "delete"
button in any of the menus for the list of accounts as you would
expect in any OTHER list handling software!?)

BTW, had a quick look at your other thread and here's a few thoughts:

1) In addition to the /system/library/fonts and ~/library/fonts
folders, there is ALSO a /library/fonts folder that stores system
level fonts. If you deleted everything from it, that will cause
some problems I suspect.

2) font availability in the system is not verified (or at least,
is not SUPPOSED to be verified) by an application looking
directly in the above mentioned folders for fonts. They are
supposed to query the ATS (Apple Type Support) system. The ATS
system has lots of caches for tracking where stuff is. I don't
know about Tiger, but in Panther this caching can get hosed such
that fonts actually present and fonts reported to applications by
the ATS as being "present" don't always match. Look for caches
and preferences both at the user level and system level with the
letters "ATS" in the filename. My guess is that the removal of
those files in your old admin account is probably all that was
needed. Not that deleteing this files will cause some
enabled/disabled settings in font book to be lost since font book
is only reflecting what it sees in the ATS caches and preferences.

3) Again, I don't know about Tiger but in Panther, a few of the
fonts distributed with Office 2004 for Mac had some kind of
characteristic that when viewed or touched from the Font Book
utility, would drop out of sight of the ATS system--i.e., Font
book and other applications couldn't see them even though they
WERE actually installed in the correct font folders. IF Microsoft
could build such fonts, then others could too so you may have
several fonts of this type installed on your system.

4) If your system gets out of sync as explained in "3" above,
then the only way I've found to correct it is to delete the ATS
files indicated in "2" above.

Font problems in Panther seem to be a combination of a very low
durability on the side of Apple's font handling system (ATS) and
font packages that are ill-formed in some fashion (such as a few
of those Microsoft fonts I referred to above). Since I've not
read anything about significant font system fixes being done in
Tiger, I can only assume that it may have inherited some of the
Panther ATS bugginess.

 

[Liza]

Thanks, Jeff - I have to admit I feel a bit dumb after having read you
(completely obvious) answer, problem was I was trying to delete tha
user account from within the same user account *duh*!

However, now that I know how to do it, I'm just going to hang ten for
bit - not brave enough yet, just need to make sure I really did transfe
ALL my files across to the new user account!

Thanks for the other advice, too - hope it helps someone else, and I'l
come back to it if I find myself in the same situation again, but thi
solution works well enough for me (and a whole lot easier, too!).

_Lesson_learnt:_ don't mess with fonts on a mac! This was told to m
by a pro about five years ago when I first started flirting with macs
but I had hoped that things had improved..

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Jeff and Liza,

There are some specific Tiger/Word font problems that cause crashes/freezes
in Word. The crash logs from these incidents all mention ATSUI. Both Apple
and MS are aware of these issues and a fix will hopefully be forthcoming
from one or the other before long.

As for what all of the system font cache files are and where to find them,
here you go (and the first two seem to have the most impact):

Com.apple.ATS.plist (Home/Library/Prefs)
Com.apple.ATS ( /Library/Caches)
FontTablesAnnex ( /System/Library/Caches)
All other files whose names include .ATS or font found in
/System/Library/Caches, especially com.apple.ATS.System.fcache and
com.apple.ATSServer.FODB_System

But, if it's a problem specific to an Office application, try trashing the
Office Font Cache first: ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache
(11).

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

Beth Rosengard
MacOffice MVP

Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/index.htm>
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Entourage Help Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org>

 

[Liza]

Hi Beth

I did find those font cache files listed by you in another thread, an
had tried them along with the others, but nothing changed for me
unfortunately - although I'd recommend to others to try that route an
other recommendations here first, as I'm sure there are certai
combinations of things that take place, making it work for some and no
for others