Strange Font Behavior

[Scott Bulmer]

Hi all,
We pretty much use only Arial for all text that appears in our construction documents. I have no idea what causes this, but the fonts will change on their own, typically upon opening a PLN to Italic Arial. Ariel is present in Font Book, as well as available in all drop down lists in AC (no brackets). In the attached image you can see Arial is selected for the door marker, however both in the preview window as well as in plan the font is italicized. This seems to happen primarily with opening markers in addition to schedules. What causes this and how do we get rid of it?
Thanks for any thoughts, Scott

[Thomas Holm]

A guess is that you have several different Arials installed. In MacOSX there are several places where fonts reside, example: /library/fonts/ or user/library/fonts/.

In some of these places, one or the otehr is missing, or one is redundant , and therefore their numbering is out of order.

I use a free third-party utility calle Linotype Font Explorer to handle this. It's much better than Font Book.

[Scott Bulmer]

Thomas, thank you so much for your advise. Sorry for the delayed response, but had a fire drill going on here after yesterday's post.

Anyway I have downloaded Font Explorer and performed the initial clearing of the font cache as well as limiting the fonts to be used. I am doing something wrong as I the italic issue still persists. The attached screen shot compares the AC font drop-down list showing missing bracketed fonts (which have never been used to my knowledge) to those available and controlled by Font Explorer. Any additional insight will be greatly appreciated as apparently I'm just a font novice.

[Erika Epstein]

Hi Scott,
Happy to check out the files if you want to send them. You have my email or call.

[Thomas Holm]

Well, I'm no expert either, but I've had issues.

You don't tell if this is happening within certain projects on your machine, or if it's a problem when you open a project on one machine but not when you open the same project on another machine?

If the latter, I'd re-install archicad, and perhaps update the system by applying the Combo updater from Apple on that machine only. Use a utility like OnyX to clean caches, especially font caches, first. (And backup the machine before that).

If it's the first issue, I'd perhaps just disable the Arial Italic font first. (you must check that Apples Font Book no longer manages fonts, if you've installed FontExplorer). Arial will still look italic when needed I think, but a bit uglier than when using the font.

if needed, backup the font file to some external drive or another network machine, and then delete all copies of it from the trouble machine. Then empty font caches, restart, repair permissions, and check.

After that I guess I'm out of ideas!

[Scott Bulmer]

Thomas wrote:
A guess is that you have several different Arials installed. In MacOSX there are several places where fonts reside, example: /library/fonts/ or user/library/fonts/.

In some of these places, one or the otehr is missing, or one is redundant , and therefore their numbering is out of order.

Thomas, I think I have fixed my issues based on your observations. The article/link below expands on your ideas and is a great font primer for other (font challenged) people like myself . Thanks again.

http://www.jklstudios.com/misc/osxfonts.html

[Thomas Holm]

Thanks, Scott, good article!
As for the font management, since I got Fontexplorer, I've only had issues when FontBook wakes up and fights back, which it does once in a while, I guess after OSX updates and such. FE lets me disable all font duplicates which erases most of these issues.