[HOWTO] Avoid font problems when upgrading your OS

[CaptainQuark]

I'm a graphic designer with a fairly substantial collection of fonts. These fonts are vital to my ability to design and produce the publications I am so proud of. But I had some nightmare issues with my fonts when upgrading Mac OS X –*until I learned the trick described below.

At this point, I should explain that I have 4000+ PostScript Type 1 and TrueType fonts in a folder on my hard disk and use Suitcase X1 to manage them. The Mac OS X 'Fonts' folder in the User library is fine if you have a few fonts on your system, but as all of the fonts in that folder open whenever you boot up your system, this is obviously not a practical solution. Quite apart from the fact that it would take a week to start up, I can't live with mile-lomg font menus in my apps!

Before you even think about stickin' your shiny new Mac OS CD/DVD into your Mac, compress your entire fonts folder into an archive using Stuffit or similar. Depending on the size of your fonts folder, this might be a 'leave it running overnight' kinda job.

Then trash the entire folder. Bye bye!

Install your OS upgrade.

Then decompress the fonts folder and fire up your font management software.

Voilà! Because your OS has not had access to your font collection, nothing untoward can happen to it, thus avoiding all of the font problems that I and many other have experienced.

Hope that helps.

[fryke]

Couldn't you just start Suitcase before upgrading the OS and deactivate all fonts? Back when I used Suitcase, I kept my fonts in a separate folder (~/Fonts), so the OS wouldn't really touch them. I didn't ever have problems with OS upgrading killing my fonts. I _did_ have problems with Suitcase needing an update for a new version of the operating system, but that problem couldn't be solved by stuffing the fonts folder...