They’re going to kick me out of the film-fetishizing, photo-luddite club for sure. I had an idea for a quick little photo this afternoon. Did I pick up the Holga or the XA? Nope. I grabbed the digital camera. What is this world coming to?!
This is me. This is my sporty new PowerBook. This is me naively dumping the Adobe Font Folio into Apple’s brand-new font management utility Font Book. This is me trusting Font Book to “Resolve Duplicates.”
This is my sporty new PowerBook reduced to a braindead, but still breathing lump of aluminum, able to boot, but unable to do much more than spin the colorful “beach ball of doom” whenever I try to do anything.
This is me taking to the web and seeing Apple’s Article #25486 which explains why certain blocks of text turned into gobbledegook. This is me searching farther to discover that I am not alone in my troubles. (Especially entertaining is a comment which quotes a letter to DiamondSoft about Font Reserve. More on this later.)
This is me attempting to fix the situation with an “Archive and Install” re-installation (actually, a retrograde, because I had installed all the updates to 10.3.2.) This is me realizing that my problem is not a system problem — it’s a user problem.
This is me reaching in my Home/Library/Fonts folder, grabbing everything i see there, and flinging it into the trash. (Be careful here, Font Book’s default behavior is to move your fonts into this folder, not copy them, so you may want to not empty the trash right away.
This is me logging out and back in (just in case.) And this is me, happy once again, hours later.
What sort of idiocy is this?! I won’t add (much) more verbiage to the already excellent collection of dissatisfication at Blurbomat, but I will add my call for a good replacement for the excellent font management I had in OS9 with ATM.
Font Book: aggressively worthles.
Font Reserve: it’s lofty promises suckered me for a hundred bucks. Turned out to be overly complicated, horribly slow and played needless magic shell games with my fonts.
Suitcase: you can be damn sure I’ll be checking it out, but it doesn’t sound too hopeful.
What is so hard about building a font manager that keeps my fonts exactly where they are, can deal with Postscript, and can just leave the system fonts alone?! It’s a simple idea — what’s the problem?
[Update: 04.01.2004] After my Font Book fiasco (cronicled above), I looked around for more alternatives, other than the ones available at the time and listed above. I’m very happy to be able to add another one to the list. I’ve been using Font Agent Pro for about a month now and am very pleased with the way it works. It’s simple like ATM was but powerful like Font Reserve. And, unlike Font Reserve, it’s actually comprehensible and it doesn’t ferret my fonts away in some undisclised location. Go now and download the fully-functional, 30-day demo. You’ll thank yourself.
