Specifications

Managing multiple versions of a font
If you have documents that use PostScript versions of a font with the same name,
such as Helvetica, rather than the dfont version that comes with Mac OS X, you will
want to make sure that you use the same font for output that was used during the
original design of the document. Otherwise, the type might flow differently or glyphs
might be substituted. To ensure that the correct version of the font is used, you can
perform any of the following actions:
• Activate the replacement font in Font Book.
• Remove the font and replace it with your version.
• Remove the font and use a third-party font manager to open the new version of
the font.
• Convert the output file to a PDF and embed all fonts.
It’s easy to verify which font is actually in use, determine the fonts necessary for
printing a file, and ensure that a customer’s font versions are being used. Simply
create a Master Fonts set as outlined previously, then use Font Book to create a new
collection containing job-specific fonts. If you disable your Master Fonts and then
view the document for the current project, Mac OS X will alert you to any missing
fonts. You can add the necessary fonts to the job-specific collection.
Deleting font caches
If your fonts are garbled, or if there are fonts that won’t empty from the Trash even
after you restart your Mac, try deleting the Mac OS X font caches.
You can do this manually by finding and removing these files:
• In /System/Library/Caches:
– fontTablesAnnex
(fontTablesAnnex contains the character encodings/mappings for all of the fonts
on your system. Information in this file can lead to garbled text.)
– com.apple.ATS.System.fcache
– com.apple.ATSServer.FODB_System
• In /Library/Caches:
– com.apple.ATS
• In your home directory’s Library/Preferences folder:
– com.apple.ATS.plist
26
Technology Tour
Advanced Typography
with Mac OS X
Font corruption
In Mac OS 9, if two fonts had the same
internal ID number, Mac OS 9 renumbered
one of them to avoid conflicts. As a result,
sometimes a font file became corrupted,
triggering application and system crashes.
Mac OS X doesn’t try to alter fonts, so the
chances of a font file becoming corrupted
are almost nonexistent. This doesn’t mean
that there are no longer corrupt fonts.
Legacy fonts from earlier systems and
fonts purchased from nonstandard ven-
dors may still cause issues.