Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

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ninjagame
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Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

Post by ninjagame »

Hi all,

Since updating to OS 10.6.7, I'm experiencing a very specific font problem which is definitely not related to NWP exclusively, but maybe someone has a solution anyway.
The problem is as follows: Since I've updated to OS 10.6.7, in documents using the font "Futura Light" the dots in punctuation marks are not displayed on the screen anymore. This affects full stops, horizontal ellipses, and the dots in question marks and exclamation marks.
Funny thing is: When I print the document, the punctuation marks are there. The same happens when I save the document as PDF.
The problem occurs, as I've mentioned already, not only in NWP but also in Pages, TextEdit, and Word. It seems to occur only in Futura Light. But it wasn't there until I updated to OS 10.6.7 and I can't think of any reason why it just appeared.
Does anyone have the same problem? Is there any chance of solving it short of downgrading to OS 10.6.6?

Thank you!

ninjagame
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Hamid
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Re: Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

Post by Hamid »

ninjagame wrote: Does anyone have the same problem?
On my Intel iMac Core i3 3.06 GHz no problem with dots of question and exclamation marks. They appear on screen and print, but horizontal ellipses neither appear on screen nor in print.
Clearing fonts caches does not solve the problem.
Kino
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Re: Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

Post by Kino »

ninjagame wrote:It seems to occur only in Futura Light.
I don’t have Futura Light. Perhaps is it an OpenType PostScript font (*.otf)? If so, the only cure would be to downgrade to 10.6.6. Fonts of that kind are badly broken in 10.6.7. I reproduced the problem discussed in Apple’s discussion board below with the Italic typeface of Minion Pro, Caslon Pro, etc., etc.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jsp ... ID=2794186
ninjagame
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Re: Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

Post by ninjagame »

Thanks, Hamid and Kino, for your replies! After some research on several discussion boards, I've resorted to re-installing OS 10.6 and running the 10.6.6 combo update again. With that, the problem disappeared.
Let's hope for the next version of 10.6.x to fix the problem, or, ultimately, for 10.7.

ninjagame
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greenmorpher
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Re: Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

Post by greenmorpher »

Also: http://db.tidbits.com/article/12078

Kind regards

Geoffrey Heard
Business & Environment Writer, Editor, Publisher
The Worsley Press
ninjagame
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Re: Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

Post by ninjagame »

Thanks, greenmorpher, for the link which was very interesting!
The problem I was experiencing, however, was quite the opposite. It didn't affect PDF at all. It was extremely specific: It affected only the dots in punctuation marks (periods, semicolons, the dots - and only the dots - in exclamation marks and question marks). It did not affect the dots on the "i" or on the umlauts in German. It affected only one specific font face in one specific font I'm using. And, this font is not an .otf font but a .ttc font. However, the screen fonts (if I get this right) are PostScript Type 1 fonts.
From then on, it got really weird. The problem appeared only with the screen display. Whenever I created a PDF using Nisus's "Save as PDF..." feature, the dots were right there where they're supposed to be. (For the record: I don't have any Adobe software on my machine; I don't even have Adobe Reader.) Same thing when I printed a document: All the dots appeared on paper.
But since I've fare more than one hundred documents using this font, which would all have required reformatting, I finally applied the solution mentioned in the article: Downgrading to 10.6.6.
Groucho
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Re: Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

Post by Groucho »

The web page mentioned by Geoff goes:

“PDFs with OpenType PostScript fonts created in 10.6.7 will have this problem forever, which could result in problems well into the future.”

So be careful. If you created a pdf using Quartz, i.e. through the Save as PDF in the print dialog or NW’s File > Save as PDF, you should, first, downgrade the OS and, second, convert the files again.

I sent an email to my publisher for this matter, but they don’t have 10.6.7. They are very slow at updating. Actually, they still have a computer running System 8.5 somewhere.

Henry.
ninjagame
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Re: Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

Post by ninjagame »

Henry -

As I wrote: The problem did not occur when I created a PDF through the "Save as PDF" print dialog. The PDF was just fine. Neither did it occur when I printed the document (or the PDF created from the document, for that matter). It occured only with the screen display. The dots simply weren't displayed on the screen of my computer (although it was clear that there was something indeed; and the problem affected only one font face of the font I'm using - when I changed the font face from "Light" to "Medium", the dots were there). So, simply no WYSIWYG there.
What I haven't tried yet, though, is creating a .ps file from the Nisus document and then create a PDF from this .ps file using e.g. Acrobat Distiller. But that wouldn't be part of my workflow anyway.
Whether or not this problem may occur in the future in PDFs as well, I can't say. But that's not my immediate concern.

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Elbrecht
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Re: Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

Post by Elbrecht »

Hi -

what brand of Futura Light are you using? There are lots of Futura versions out now!
Mine is still an old PostScript Type1 from Fundicion Tipografica Neufville S. A. 1997…

HE
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ninjagame
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Re: Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

Post by ninjagame »

Elbrecht -

Mine is a PostScript Type 1, too, except that it's from 1987, not 1997. Maybe that's the point.

ninjagame
Kino
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Re: Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

Post by Kino »

As far as I have observed, the OS X 10.6.7 bug affects glyphs which are not defined directly. There are two ways to define glyphs indirectly: [1] composite glyphs, e.g. “à” as a composite of “a” and “`” with positions and X/Y scaling (I’m speaking of the internal strucuture of fonts, which has nothing to do with the Unicode normalization) and [2] OpenType features, e.g. small caps “A” supplied by “smcp” feature, ligatured “fi” supplied by “liga” feature, etc., etc. Both the two methods are broken in some fonts and I don’t know the reasons why the other fonts (seem to) continue to work normally. That said…
ninjagame wrote:It didn't affect PDF at all. It was extremely specific: It affected only the dots in punctuation marks (periods, semicolons, the dots - and only the dots - in exclamation marks and question marks).
Presumably, those characters in your font are composite glyphs whose dots are supplied by a single base glyph and it is the relationship between the base glyph and those punctuation marks that is broken. Although not 100% sure, I tend to think that the bug does affect your PDFs but you don’t notice it because, when unable to extract embedded fonts, Adobe Reader (and Preview) tries to use glyphs from special Multiple Master fonts, very often successfully as far as MacRoman characters are concerned and it would not be very easy to distinguish, for example, Helvetica’s full stop from that of Arial.

As I don’t have the time to downgrade to an earlier version of OS X and the only affected font indispensable for me is a custom font for Arabic transliteration, I just generated a TrueType version of it using FontLab Studio, which seems to work fine. That workaround would be worth trying for those who are in a similar situation and familiar with a font editor.

Edit: tried to make my posting clearer.
Groucho
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Re: Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

Post by Groucho »

A composite glyph is the best guess. Though I don’t know why a foundry should rely on a composite for an exclamation mark, or question mark, to name a few. I do have Futura, two versions, both of them True Type. The first (I copy-paste from Font Book): © Copyright 1998, Neufville Digital. The second: Copyright 1990-1993 by Bitstream Inc. All Rights Reserved. They don’t allow of any composite version of question marks or any other marks, as far as I see.
But I think this is a bug related to the OS, not to the fonts.Even more so if you get things straight when you downgrade to 10.6.6.

Henry.
ninjagame
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Re: Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

Post by ninjagame »

Groucho wrote:But I think this is a bug related to the OS, not to the fonts. Even more so if you get things straight when you downgrade to 10.6.6.
Right. That would be my guess, too: An example of post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Let's wait and see, then.

ninjagame.
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Elbrecht
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Re: Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

Post by Elbrecht »

Hi ninjagame -

I guess you know, but there is always a possible font conflict with the OS X version of Futura - that's why I disable the OS X version in Font Book to enjoy my old Type 1 Futura. And you are right somehow with 1987 - way back in the very beginning…

http://www.elbrecht.com/PNGs/Futura.png

HE

PS: I don't seem to have problems with Futura PS - but my last print job drove me crazy with Myriad OT…
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Kino
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Re: Font problem after updating to OS 10.6.7

Post by Kino »

Groucho wrote:Though I don’t know why a foundry should rely on a composite for an exclamation mark, or question mark, to name a few. I do have Futura, two versions, both of them True Type. […] They don’t allow of any composite version of question marks or any other marks, as far as I see.
No, no, what I mean by “composite glyphs” has nothing to do with Unicode’s precomposed/decomposed characters or some OpenType/AAT features and is invisible to end users. The composition in “composite glyphs” is an easy way to create glyphs which are similar in a certain sense, to keep the consistency (shape, scale, relative position) among them, and to make the font file size smaller. Perhaps you can compare it to NWP’s character/paragraph styles. You could get the same print out whether you apply style attributes via styles or manually and individually. However, the use of styles makes it much easier to change a style attribute globally and consistently.
futura_agrave.png
futura_agrave.png (38.44 KiB) Viewed 17626 times
AFAIK, the composition is used usually for accented letters as you see above and not for punctuation marks but this might be effective (I’m just guessing; I don’t have Futura Light) when you need to create a family of typefaces of various weights, e.g. regular, light, ultra light, thin, bold, black, extra black, etc.
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