With Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, some users report problems with Helvetica Narrow appearing as substitute font for Helvetica. There are couple of things you can try to fix the problem.
* The obvious thing is to delete Helvetica Narrow. Also look for "N Helvetica Narrow", which may be stored in one of the font folders. Spotlight search for the fonts, to be sure to find all instances.
* Disable Helvetica Narrow. That seems to have worked for some people, but not for everyone.
* Install Helvetica a second time, but this time to your User library or /Library/Fonts. You can find the font using Spotlight. Drag it to your User library or /Library/Fonts or use Font Book. If you get a warning about a conflict, choose "Allow Conflict". (This is not a very clean solution, but it has worked for some people.)
* Disable all your User fonts - just in case.
* Remove all System 9 fonts from /Library/Fonts. You can recognise them as they appear with a size of zero.
For other font problems and suggested solutions see deleting font cache and missing fonts.
Update 29 May 2008: The updated version of Mac OS X, 10.5.3, is said to fix the Helvetica Narrow problem.
8 comments:
There is another problem with Pages 08 under Leopard. Check the discussion on:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5885380#5885380
Yes, I know. Typographic extras, small caps, ligatures and some OpenType fonts in an unhappy combination. I was actually hoping for a fix from Apple's side, but if more people complain about it, I suppose it should be mentioned here too.
The font Helvetica is located in System/Library/Fonts while N Helvetica Narrow sits in Library/Fonts, so it seems obvious that Pages looks in the latter by default and not in the first one (but why?).
Moving Helvetica to Library/Fonts (or simply making a copy there) has solved the problem for me.
Thanks for your comment! It is probably just a bug in Pages - I would expect this blog entry to become obsolete with some imminent update.
I updated the entry to reflect your comment.
CreativeTechs recommend people who use Helvetica for professional design purposes to buy Adobe's version to get around the problems described above. The link explains why.
Its definitely not simply a Pages problem. I see Helvetica Narrow EVERYWHERE these days. Whenever I copy/paste or drag and drop text from one place to another, as the default font in web browsers, etc. etc... Narrow has completely taken over Helvetica (and Helvetica Neue)!
Despite its pretty shine, Leopard has been nothing but a series of problems for me. I can no longer laugh at the Vista -> XP "upgraders", as I am seriously considering going back to Tiger...
I fixed the Helvetica Narrow substitution problem by making sure /Library/Fonts/ had a copy of Helvetica, which I copied from /System/Library/Fonts, as mentioned above.
In response to your comment: "the font Helvetica is located in System/Library/Fonts while N Helvetica Narrow sits in Library/Fonts, so it seems obvious that Pages looks in the latter by default and not in the first one (but why?)."
The font search order is: Application fonts, /library/fonts, /system/library/fonts/, /user/your_name/library/fonts, classic system/fonts, network/library/fonts. Which explains why your solution of copying the font from /library/fonts into /system/library/fonts has worked for you.
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