Solve font problems Page 2 of 2

Working Mac

by Jackie Dove, Ted Landau, Macworld.com

Take out the cache

Are you experiencing garbled text, fonts that refuse to delete, or application crashes? Your problem may not reside within the fonts themselves—it may be within their cache files. OS X uses these files to keep track of the fonts you’ve installed and the characters each one uses. If the cache files become corrupt, you’ve got trouble in font city.

Happily, the solution is simple: delete the cache files. When you do, OS X creates new, uncorrupted copies with default settings. You can either let a third-party utility do this for you or take the do-it-yourself approach.

A Helping Hand If you prefer having a utility take out the trash for you, I recommend Font Finagler ($10). This utility creates a list of all the relevant cache files on your drive and then lets you delete them with the click of a button.

DIY Details To do it yourself, locate the cache files in the Finder and drag them to the Trash. It’s that simple. In some cases, you’ll need an administrator’s password. Here are the items to mark for extinction (and where you’ll find them):

com.apple.ATS.plist: This file is located in / your user folder /Library/Preferences. Among other things, it contains information about which fonts you’ve disabled via Font Book. Deleting this file will likely reactivate disabled fonts.

com.apple.ATS: This folder is located in /Library/Caches. Delete it along with all its contents.

fontTablesAnnex: This file is located in /System/Library/Caches; if it’s corrupted, it’s the likeliest cause of garbled text. Delete it.

Office Font Cache: This file is located in / your user folder /Library/Preferences/ Microsoft. Delete it if your font troubles are restricted to Microsoft Office applications.

All other files whose names include .ATS or font: These are located in the /System/Library/Caches folder. The com.apple.ATS.System.fcache and com.apple .ATSServer.FODB_System files are the most important ones to delete. But it can’t hurt to get rid of all of them.

Whichever method you choose, restart your Mac after deleting the cache files. That’s the best way to make sure OS X immediately and correctly creates new files. If a corrupt font is actually causing your problem, eliminating the cache files won’t help—but cleaning out your font caches is often effective and certainly easy. So before hassling with your fonts, give it a try. —Ted Landau