We’re having some issues with our collection of fonts this week, so I’ve done some research. Here’s a list of handy font reference material:

Font Doctor, for fixing conflicts and repairing bad fonts. So far, our experience has been good. If it’s doing what it says it’s doing, we have approximately one BILLION fonts with conflicting ID numbers. It’s a nice little app, and it’s busily humming away while I type this.

How Fonts Really Work In OS X and Font Fatigue: Pruning Excess Fonts in Mac OS X go into detail (for 10.2) on where fonts live in OS X and how to deal with them. Both were written several years ago, but I think the information is probably relevant for today as well.

Font Locations, via Apple. Additionally, Using and Managing Fonts In OS X are also 10.2 specific, but full of good information. (Who knew that fonts live in six different places on OS X? This is not normally a problem until you load 10,000+ fonts into Suitcase—then you’re going to have some headaches.)

Finally, a Apple Forums article which goes into exhaustive detail about pruning fonts and then how to reset your system (essentially, prune the system, trash your font manager’s preferences, and reload everything) so that Quark doesn’t shoot you the finger when you try to use Helvetica. This is good information.

I’m still giving Linotype’s Font ExplorerX a thumbs-up, even though we’ve had some conflicts between its auto-activation feature and inDesign, forcing a retreat to Suitcase to get some things to work. I’m thinking this is an overall font conflict problem and not a Font ExplorerX problem, but stay tuned.