This page details the font problems that have been showing up on some of our customer’s machines that have recently upgraded to Mac OS 10.3.5. One of our technicians, has investigated the nature of the problem and has come up with some suggestions on what actions you can take if you've already upgraded to 10.3.5. The following explanation is fairly technical, so if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to give us a call.

You may have seen the report on MacFixIt a few days back (Aug 23) about a font rendering bug in Mac OS X 10.3.5
The issue is a change in the way that Mac OS X 10.3.5 handles PostScript Type 1 fonts that use custom character maps—every Adobe 'Expert' font and most 'Expert' fonts from other font foundries. In addition to the mention on MacFixIt, a bug report has been filed with Apple (id #3777349).



It appears that only 'Expert' fonts are affected—for instance, Adobe Caslon Expert is affected but not Adobe Caslon Old Style Figures, Small Caps, Swash, Alternate, Ornaments, etc. Also, certain applications that don't rely on Apple's built-in Font Handling (see below) are not affected.

Applications that are NOT affected:

Adobe InDesign CS and Adobe Illustrator 10

Applications that are currently KNOWN to be affected:

Adobe InDesign 2—all characters missing
Quark XPress 6 and Macromedia Freehand 10—a-z, 1-0, etc., are invisible. all characters print to PostScript printers and .pdf only (invisible characters print as boxes to non-PostScript printers).
Adobe Illustrator CS and Adobe Photoshop CS—most high ascii characters are missing. only visible characters print.
Microsoft Office:Mac 2004—a-z, 1-0, etc. are missing (missing characters are automatically substituted for the default or previously selected font); fractions (G-O) and ligatures (V-Z) are visible. only visible characters print.
Macromedia Fireworks MX—a-z, 1-0, etc. are missing.
Macromedia Flash MX—a-z, 1-0, etc., are invisible; fractions (G-O) and ligatures (V-Z) are visible. all characters output to .swf.
Shockwave Flash (.swf)—all characters invisible except fractions (G-O) which appear as fractional slashes only (no numbers)
Finale 2005—similar behavior to Microsoft Office:Mac except substitutes font for the default while preserving selection (e.g., it still reports the font as Adobe Caslon Expert even for the substituted characters)
ALL Cocoa applications (TextEdit is shown in the image above)—similar behavior to Microsoft Office:Mac 2004 except substitutes Lucida Grande instead.

[2004-11-05 pm] Apple has released Mac OS X 10.3.6 which " addresses an issue for Mac OS X 10.3.5 in which some glyph fonts, certain 'Expert' or 'dingbat' fonts, would no longer appear in some applications." The other custom character map bug (remapping of characters to different key sequences) was fixed by Mac OS X 10.3.5. We have prepared a comparison [PDF, 580 KB] between the custom character map behaviors of Mac OS 9.2.2 and Mac OS X 10.3.4–10.3.6.

Also, while there were some reports of problems with Zapf Dingbats after updating to Mac OS X 10.3.5, this was not the same issue that affected PostScript Type 1 fonts with custom character maps (e.g., 'Expert' fonts). Try purging your font cache files using Mark Douma's Font Finagler ($10 shareware) to resolve font display issues. Also try deleting all AdobeFnt*.lst files (use theFinder to find files beginning with AdobeFnt and ending withlst, then delete them).

[2004-09-16 am]Updated list to include Finale 2005; attributed to Robert Farlee.

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