Mike Salsbury’s Blog

Given that Mac OS X has virtually nothing in common with its
predecessor, Mac OS 9, the fact that Apple managed to build it to
support all the same font types OS 9 did is quite an impressive
undertaking.  On the other hand, they had to support legacy fonts
or graphic designers would have stayed away in droves.  Most
designers and shops have invested so much money in Mac fonts over the
years that re-purchasing the fonts in some new format would have made an
OS X upgrade cost-prohibitive.

Out of the box, Mac OS X supports a variety of font formats:

• TrueType:  This
  format is Apple’s recommended format to use with OS X.  TrueType
  fonts are designed to be scaled up and down in size without looking
  “jagged”.  A single TrueType font file can hold
  information for several variants of that same font (such as italic,
  bold, or bold-italic), which makes the files convenient to work
  with.  While Windows XP also supports (and prefers) TrueType fonts,
  the Windows font file formats aren’t quite the same as the Mac TrueType
  file formats.  The good news is that Apple designed OS X to
  recognize Windows TrueType files as well as Macintosh TrueType
  files.  That makes tools such as “TTConverter” that were
  popular on OS 9 systems for converting TrueType files unnecessary.

• PostScript: 
  These are the “traditional” fonts from pre-OS 9
  days.  There are two files for each PostScript font.  One
  contains a “suitcase” file with bitmap images of the font at
  one or more sizes and variations.  The other contains the
  PostScript “printer font file” that the printer uses to scale
  the font size without looking “jagged”.  If you used
  Adobe Type Manager (ATM) on Mac OS 9, you didn’t notice any jagginess on
  screen because ATM used the printer font file to create a picture of the
  font at any required sizes with no more jagginess than actually
  necessary.  There is no version of ATM for Mac OS X, but it’s
  unnecessary anyway.  OS X draws all of its on-screen graphics using
  a technology called “Quartz” which draws all its fonts using
  the same font information used by a printer (or by ATM), so you
  generally aren’t going to see any jagginess with a PostScript font on OS
  X.

• PostScript
  Multiple Master Fonts:  These are not supported in Mac OS X.
  Fortunately, I don’t think too many people ever bought into this Adobe
  technology, so you probably don’t have any of these that didn’t come
  bundled with something Adobe sold you.

• OpenType:  This font format is a
  new design from Microsoft and Adobe.  Similar to TrueType, an
  OpenType font contains one file for each font.  That one file might
  contain the different variants (bold, italic, etc.) for the font. 
  The main advantage to OpenType is that the exact same font file (without
  change) works on Mac OS X and Windows.

• Bitmap:  This is pretty much a
  legacy font left over from the days before PostScript laser
  printers.  These fonts are stored in suitcase files, just like the
  screen fonts for PostScript files, but unlike Postscript screen fonts,
  there is no matching printer font.  As a result, bitmap fonts tend
  to look very jagged when printed on today’s laser printing
  equipment.  Because of their poor quality, few designers make much
  use of these fonts today unless they are designing something to look
  “retro”.  While Classic in OS X will more or less accept
  these fonts, and you might get Mac OS X to work with them if you’re
  lucky, it’s not recommended that you use bitmap fonts with OS
  X.

Getting all the above font types to work with OS X
(OK, except for Multiple Master fonts and “official” support
for Bitmap fonts) was quite an achievement.  Unfortunately, for
graphic designers, the support between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X isn’t
seemless and trouble-free.  Far from that, in fact.  OS X
offers lots of opportunities for Font Headaches.

When helping
one of our designers make the OS 9 to OS X switch, I learned that while
OS 9 might recognize and group together a variety of fonts as
“Garamond”, OS X did something else.  One of the fonts
might come in as “AGaramond”, another as “Garamond”,
and yet another as “Adobe Garamond”.  Other fonts that
had been grouped together on OS 9 were split up even worse.  When
the designer took a look at the font list, he couldn’t find many of the
fonts he used regularly.  They were there, I’d made sure of
that.  They’d just been named differently by OS X and spread
throughout the Font menu.  

Some fonts wouldn’t
come over from OS 9 at all.  Perhaps they were corrupted. 
Perhaps they had conflicting IDs that OS 9 didn’t notice and OS X
did.  For those, I would up feeding some through a font format
conversion utility to change them from PostScript to TrueType (or
vice-versa).  In a few cases, we simply had to buy brand new copies
of the fonts from an online vendor.  Even those new copies had
their problems.  After spinning our collective mental wheels on
this for far too long, we hired an outside consultant who came in, used
Suitcase X to sort out the corrupted, conflicting, and otherwise
problematic fonts, and things got better.  But they’re still
nothing like the nice, neatly organized OS 9 font list.

To try and minimize the “trauma” associated with moving from
Mac OS  9 to Mac OS X, we deployed a “pilot” machine in
the graphic arts area.  This machine had a “superset” of
all the software the designers used on their individual Macs.  It
had a “superset” of all their fonts, too.  Still, they
occasionally found they need one or another font that hadn’t made it to
the pilot machine.  Unfortunately, OS X only let them install it
for themselves, one at a time.  Aside from giving them all
administrator permission to the machine, which is a no-no in our
company, there was nothing we could do for them except have an
administrator do it.  The good news is that it’s unlikely that they
will be getting that many new fonts, so this will not be a huge issue
for the two of us who do administrator work.

In
Mac OS 9, you had one place to look for your fonts.  They were in
the System Folder, in the “Fonts” folder.  If you had
Suitcase, they could be in a variety of places, but for them to be in
all those places you had to know where they were.  So on a
“stock” OS 9 build, you knew where to find and where to put
your fonts.  Not so in Mac OS X.  If you’re looking for a
specific font, you might find it in one of these places…

And if the above isn’t enough
for you, certain applications also have their own Fonts folders. 
Adobe is one example of this.  They drop a number of fonts in
“/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts/” which aren’t
available to other applications because they’re in a non-standard
location.  Gotta love developers who think they know better than
the operating system…  Sometimes I wonder if this was done on
purpose to make it easier to sell third-party software like Suitcase
X.

In Mac OS 9, fonts were listed
alphabetically in the Font menu from top to bottom.  OS X, for some
reason, dispenses with this.  If  you launch Font Book and
scroll down the font list, you’ll see that it goes A-Z and A-Z again,
etc.  This doesn’t make designers very happy either.  If
they’re looking for “Garamond” in the font list, not only
might Apple have called it “AGaramond” or “Adobe
Garamond” or “Garamond” or “ITC Garamond”, they
might also have placed it in separate parts of the list so that each one
appears in a separate A-Z section of the list.

At first, I
thought Font Book had some rhyme or reason in how it decided which A-Z
list the font went into.  For example, I thought maybe TrueType
fonts were listed first, then PostScript, then OpenType.  That’s
not it.  The Font Book list on the machine at my desk displays in
Font Book like this:

In the
above list, “Al Bayan” is a Windows TrueType font that resides
in the “/Library/Fonts” directory, “American
Typewriter” is a Macintosh Datafork TrueType font in
“/Library/Fonts”, “Zapf Dingbats” is a Macintosh
Datafork TrueType font in the “/System/Fonts” directory, and
“Apple Chancery” is a Macintosh Datafork TrueType font in the
“/Library/Fonts” directory.

Something else our
developers noticed was that documents created in OS 9, when opened in OS
X, didn’t quite lay out their type the same way.  Why? 
Because OS X is a different operating system (despite Apple’s claims
that it’s just the next evolution of OS 9) and it renders fonts on
screen and on the printer using different technology than OS 9. 
Just as the same document prints slightly differently on Windows and Mac
OS 9, the same document prints differently on Mac OS X than on Mac OS
9.  This is one more way that Apple really shafted graphic artists
with OS X.  Fortunately for the designers, this ought to be a
one-time nuisance (as long as a document stays on OS X once
“ported” to it).

While I am impressed that Apple managed to incorporate
support for all the major font formats (including Windows TrueType and
OpenType) in OS X, it’s clear to me that they must have rushed OS X out
the door.  A little more work might have merged the fonts from
“/Library/Fonts” and “/System/Library/Fonts” into
one folder, to reduce the number of potential font installation
locations.  With a touch more work, fonts installed by end users
could have gone into either that merged directory (with UNIX permissions
that make them unreadable by other users) and made it possible to have
non-administrator users install fonts for everyone to use.  (It’s
not like this would have created a major security problem…)

Perhaps more amazing to me is that I don’t see a whole lot of loud
screaming and complaining about this on the Mac message forums. 
Perhaps that’s why these font issues have persisted from (at least) OS X
10.2 to 10.4.

Maybe this confusing mess just doesn’t bother
the rest of you like it does me…

admin Mac Support font, font problems, OS X font headaches, OS X font problems, OS X fonts