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jeffb996
Many Mac users have experienced problems with Office 2004, where Office
applications display a series of dialog boxes at launch stating that
"The font (name) is corrupt and should be removed". The current
solution set involves clearing font caches, disabling the WYSIWYG
display in the font pull-downs, using FontFinagler, and several others.
Neither Apple nor Microsoft have come up with a positive cause or a
universally effective solution as yet. I experienced this problem
several months ago and thought I had it solved until I ran the OS X
10.4.7 updater and the problem returned. This time, it resisted all of
the previous workarounds.
I stumbled across another solution that worked in my case and may help
other users. A program called Linotype FontExplorer X is available for
free download. This program contains a utility under the "Tools" menu
called "Clean System Fonts folders..." When selected, this utility
puts up a dialog box to confirm that the user wishes to run it and also
states, "All fonts not installed by the Mac OS X Installation will be
moved to a folder on your Desktop. You can backup this folder
afterwards for the case that an application needs some of these fonts
or you can delete them all." The utility takes very little time to
run. When it finished, I was able to launch and run Office
applications with no errors.
Many of the fonts that were moved to the Desktop had names that clearly
identified them as application-specific (such as OCR-A installed by
TurboTax) and had been installed as part of the application
installation. I then started FontBook and reinstalled several fonts
that had previously been declared as "corrupt" by Office. Again,
Office applications launched with no difficulty and the reinstalled
fonts were available for use by the Office application. I proceeded to
reinstall all of the fonts using FontBook. A number of them were
rejected by FontBook (which had not been previously rejected by the
FontBook "Validate Fonts" function) and were not reinstalled.
Following this, all Office applications work just fine, as do all other
applications I have tested.
My hunch is that Linotype FontExplorer X recognizes a flag in each font
file that identifies whether it was installed by OS X or not and does a
better job of clearing the caches and font folders. FontBook is able
to recognize truly corrupt font files when attempting to reinstall them
and thus prevents the user from putting bad fonts back in the system.
It's not clear why Office was reporting perfectly good fonts as
corrupt, but the sequence of events shows that there were, in fact, bad
font files present. Many of the fonts that would not reinstall had
very old file creation dates, some as far back as 1993. By following
this procedure, I had confirmed the status of each font file and had
used OS X to reinstall all of the fonts that had been installed by
other applications.
I hope this information is useful and presents an effective solution
for other users. I know from experience that this can be an
extraordinarily frustrating problem to solve.
applications display a series of dialog boxes at launch stating that
"The font (name) is corrupt and should be removed". The current
solution set involves clearing font caches, disabling the WYSIWYG
display in the font pull-downs, using FontFinagler, and several others.
Neither Apple nor Microsoft have come up with a positive cause or a
universally effective solution as yet. I experienced this problem
several months ago and thought I had it solved until I ran the OS X
10.4.7 updater and the problem returned. This time, it resisted all of
the previous workarounds.
I stumbled across another solution that worked in my case and may help
other users. A program called Linotype FontExplorer X is available for
free download. This program contains a utility under the "Tools" menu
called "Clean System Fonts folders..." When selected, this utility
puts up a dialog box to confirm that the user wishes to run it and also
states, "All fonts not installed by the Mac OS X Installation will be
moved to a folder on your Desktop. You can backup this folder
afterwards for the case that an application needs some of these fonts
or you can delete them all." The utility takes very little time to
run. When it finished, I was able to launch and run Office
applications with no errors.
Many of the fonts that were moved to the Desktop had names that clearly
identified them as application-specific (such as OCR-A installed by
TurboTax) and had been installed as part of the application
installation. I then started FontBook and reinstalled several fonts
that had previously been declared as "corrupt" by Office. Again,
Office applications launched with no difficulty and the reinstalled
fonts were available for use by the Office application. I proceeded to
reinstall all of the fonts using FontBook. A number of them were
rejected by FontBook (which had not been previously rejected by the
FontBook "Validate Fonts" function) and were not reinstalled.
Following this, all Office applications work just fine, as do all other
applications I have tested.
My hunch is that Linotype FontExplorer X recognizes a flag in each font
file that identifies whether it was installed by OS X or not and does a
better job of clearing the caches and font folders. FontBook is able
to recognize truly corrupt font files when attempting to reinstall them
and thus prevents the user from putting bad fonts back in the system.
It's not clear why Office was reporting perfectly good fonts as
corrupt, but the sequence of events shows that there were, in fact, bad
font files present. Many of the fonts that would not reinstall had
very old file creation dates, some as far back as 1993. By following
this procedure, I had confirmed the status of each font file and had
used OS X to reinstall all of the fonts that had been installed by
other applications.
I hope this information is useful and presents an effective solution
for other users. I know from experience that this can be an
extraordinarily frustrating problem to solve.