Re: Why your Office 2004 Fonts want to keep loading in OS X - an explaination

From: Jeffrey Weston [MSFT] (jeffw_at_microsoft.com)
Date: 02/19/05 

Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 16:24:23 -0800

Hey Jeff, thanks for your generous contribution to the Newsgroup.

I've passed this post onto the appropriate people. This area is certainly
one we are looking into for a future release.

Thanks again, 

-- 
Jeffrey Weston
Mac Word Test
Macintosh Business Unit
Microsoft
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
"Jeff Wiseman" <wisemanja@earthlink.net> wrote in message 
news:dwCQd.1515$kU3.1361@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net...
> Why your Office 2004 Fonts want to keep loading in OS X
>
> (please note followup-to newsgroup)
>
>
> After spending a LOT of time screwing around with this, and with with the 
> gracious coaching by Matt Neuburg (thanks a lot Matt!) as well as some 
> other participants on various newgroups, I've finally come to a fairly 
> solid understanding of this problem and why it is occurring. I want to get 
> this summary down so others running into it won't have the aggravation 
> that I've had. Unfortunately, there's not much can be done about the 
> problem except avoid it until Apple stabilizes their font support software 
> and Microsoft stops using strange undocumented controls in their products.
>
>
> SYMPTOMS:
>
> Every time someone starts an Office 2004 product such as Word for the 
> first time, they get the entire office font set dumped into their home 
> font folder ~/Library/Fonts, EVEN IF the fonts are already installed there 
> or anyplace else in OS X (usually the /Library/Fonts folder).
>
>
> VARIATIONS:
>
> It's possible on a system with multiple accounts for some users not to see 
> this problem (i.e., fonts never load) and other to see it. The chances of 
> incurring the problem increase with the use of the Font Book utility.
>
>
> MECHANISM:
>
> Office seems to detect a first run on its products by the absence of 
> Microsoft office related preferences in the ~/Library/preferences area. 
> When an application like Word is first started and it determines that this 
> is a first run, it checks the OS X font environment of the User for the 
> presence of one or more specific Windows True Type fonts distributed with 
> the Office Installation. The font(s) checked for is from the following 
> list:
>
> Batang.ttf
> Gulim.ttf
> MS Gothic.ttf
> MS Mincho.ttf
> MS PGothic.ttf
> MS PMincho.ttf
> PMingLiU.ttf
> SimSun.ttf
>
> I do not know which of these fonts is the trigger but it does seem to be 
> one or more of these. Note that this set is the COMPLETE set of Windows 
> Truetype fonts provided with Office. Also note that they are all Asian 
> type fonts.
>
> When Office is checking for the presence of whichever font it is looking 
> for, it does so by using the OS X font management facilities and not just 
> looking in locations by itself. This is significant as I will explain 
> later. If it does NOT find the font(s) in question, it then copies all of 
> the fonts in the Applications area for Office into the User's home font 
> folder (~/Library/Fonts). This is a reasonable algorithm for Installation 
> in that a user has control over their own fonts and an Administrator can 
> move them to a common area if they so desired.
>
> PROBLEMS:
>
> The main issue is that Office tends to install all of its fonts even when 
> they are already installed. In searching this out I've discovered that it 
> is a result of 3 issues:
>
> 1) The set of 8 fonts identified above are all wacko to start with and all 
> exhibit the same characteristics in the Mac's font system. None of the 
> other 70+ fonts installed by Office have any of these problems. None of 
> the Windows TrueType fonts that come with the OS X have these problems. 
> Some strange characteristics when installed in OS 10.3.6 are:
>
> a) For any of these fonts, if you double-click on the font, although the 
> Font Book utility opens, you will not get an install window.
> b) If these fonts are duplicated in the Font system, they can "disappear" 
> from the font system. This doesn't mean they are Disabled, but rather they 
> won't even show up as Disabled fonts.
> c) Disabling one of these fonts can result in it disappearing.
>
> The problem in a nutshell is that these fonts are disappearing from the 
> font system, even though they actually exist in the proper folders. Since 
> Office uses the Mac's view of installed fonts, It reports to Office that 
> they do not exist and as a result, Office reinstalls another set of 
> unneeded fonts.
>
> 2) The fonts in each user's environment (i.e., the list of all enabled 
> fonts that a user can see or use) are determined through the Mac's font 
> management system. It appears that the files that track this information 
> can be very unstable. This information is kept partly in the 
> com.apple.ATS.plist file in the user's preferences folder. When fonts 
> disappear from the visibility of applications and utilities such as Font 
> Book, deleting the preference file and logging out then in can cause those 
> lost fonts to again show up in the tool's menu (although collection 
> enable/disable states can be altered and would need to be reset). I have 
> found through several hours of experimenting that the Microsoft fonts 
> listed above are the only ones that seem to keep being dropped from sight 
> which has the same effect of disabling them. None of the other Office 
> fonts are affected like this. In other words, the very fonts that 
> Microsoft is using to determine whether or not their font set is installed 
> are the very ones that are so ill-behaved that the font system keeps 
> losing track of them, necessitating a preference file deletion in order to 
> get them detectable again.
>
> 3) The Font Book utility is very buggy IMHO (I've seen Beta test software 
> far more stable than this thing). Without further experimentation using 
> other font tools, I personally have become convinced that the Font Book 
> itself is the main reason for the instabilities identified in "2)" above. 
> I believe this because even the handling of collections seems to be just 
> as buggy as the direct font handling. It has the appearance to work ok at 
> first but if you look closer and actually try doing what it is supposed to 
> do, you start seeing constant inconsistencies. If you don't use it for 
> anything except previewing fonts, it seems ok. But, if you start creating 
> multiple collections with large numbers of fonts in them (e.g., an "Office 
> fonts" collection) strange things start to happen. I've seen collections 
> that when you drag a font from the computer collection to it, it totally 
> ignores it. Then when you try to delete the collection, it refuses to go 
> away. If you then look into the Font collections folder you can see things 
> like "test.collection" and "test.collection.collection" both sitting 
> there.
>
> When you have duplicate fonts in the system, it can get pretty confused 
> here too. I saw it once where it wouldn't even let you assign one of the 
> duplicates to a collection since it seemed to insist on locking it into a 
> "Family" that it had found elsewhere. However, the Font Book's tolerance 
> for the wacko font set given previously is particularly bad. When these 
> fonts are present, especially as duplicates (which is what this problem is 
> all about--installing the font set when it is already in place) you hardly 
> have to do anything in Font Book to see them disappear from the view. When 
> you can't see them in Font Book, your applications can't see them, and 
> Office's font installation software can't see them resulting in the 
> problem being documented here.
>
>
> RECOMMENDATIONS:
>
> A) Don't try deleting the Asian Windows TrueType fonts. This triggers the 
> problem. Even touching them or Disabling them from the Font Book can 
> trigger the problem. MS put the fonts there, now you just have to live 
> with them and the space they take up on your disk and font pulldown lists. 
> Don't remove these fonts from the Applications folder for Office so they 
> won't install. This will also trigger the problem.
>
> B) Avoid doing or trusting anything significant in Font Book. Even though 
> it is "supposed to" do things, I have lost nearly all confidence in it. If 
> it doesn't seem to have all the fonts visible, delete the 
> com.apple.ATS.plist preference and log in again. That will start you clean 
> again but only a few keystrokes in the Font Book can regenerate the 
> problem.
>
> C) If Font Book is locked up such that you don't seem to be able to work 
> on certain collections, try opening an application (such as text edit) 
> that has the font panel. Although the font panel is functionally very much 
> like Font Book, It will sometimes let you do things when Font Book has 
> gone brain dead. For example, if you can't drag and drop a font from the 
> computer collection into your own new collection, try the same thing from 
> the Font Panel, you may find that it actually works there.
>
>
> I hope that this is useful to others. I wish I had this information before 
> I had to start screwing around trying to figure it out myself. All this 
> information is only my personal opinions based on the experience I've had 
> over the last couple of days. Any additional information or corrections to 
> misinterpretations I've made would be greatly appreciated.
>
> - Jeff

Relevant Pages