For ages I've been having what appear to be problems with some corrupt fonts, namely Arial which is really bad, and have been getting those friendly little pop-up messages from Suitcase telling me I have font conflicts. When I had the scary finder crash a few weeks ago and had to basically reinstall all of my Prefs, Suitcase was one of the programs that just didn't want to cooperate, but I eventually got it semi-working again. But then, I started having conflicts between what was displaying in Word and what was actually appearing on my page, uh oh. So the other day, I just decided I would completely reinstall and upgrade Suitcase and all of my fonts.

Now, I don't know about PCs, but when you do this on a Mac you can't really stop until you've finished because things won't display correctly across the board until you do. So I spent two solid bleary eyed days digging through thousands of fonts, eliminating duplicates and old corrupt fonts I'd had for ages (some of which dated back to 1992, gulp!), classifying as many as I could by keywords that made sense to me, and trying to just activate the ones that really were useful and original. After about four hours of staring at variations of Serif, Sans Serif, Book, Titling, Bold, Demi they all really do start to look alike. Over the years I've tried priniting font examples, organizing them by type, name, foundry, it's just overwhelming though. I love fonts, and can't stop collecting them, but it's frustrating to know you have a really cool font and not be able to find the damn thing.

I think I've fixed the Arial problem at least. Everything from my weblog to my email looks cleaner and sharper. Safari is no longer giving me the Beatnik looking font in lieu of Arial. So maybe this cleanup will stop some of my system crashes. Last time everything crashed I had to go in and yank all of my OS9 System fonts out of their folder, which I think helped me regain control of OSX again. I know complaining about fonts seems silly, unless you're having problems with them. One corrupt font can crash your printer, and your entire computer.

Now, my next step seems to be having to upgrade to Panther. I'm using 10.2.8 currently, and I know they are just about to come out with 10.4 (Tiger!), but I'm very leary of jumping across an entire system update. I'd like to still be able to use all of my programs, and things like my printers and scanner... The reason I now need tup upgrade, though, isn't because of Suitcase, it's because I'd like to be able to use the new version of the equivalent of the old Menu Fonts utility. I was typing stuff up last night and my word processing programs are now making me scroll through all the Helveticas, all the A Garamond's, etc. So I looked around and found You Control:Fonts. But it's OS X10.3 and up only. Oh well, I guess it's time to upgrade again. I just hope I don't screw anything major up, once I get everything working I always sort of hate to mess with it, but that's the Mac way ;-)