Leopard Bug (with solution): iCal’s icon and fonts
One of the neat hacks features added in Leopard is that iCal’s icon can now display the correct date even when it’s not running. It works for me as advertised except one thing, which this picture will make clear:
This has bugged me since I upgraded to Leopard. Fortunately, someone recently figured it out as indicated in this MacFixIt forum post. It just involves weeding out duplicate fonts (in this case, Helvetica Neue).
It seems that Font Book indicates a duplicate font by adding a bullet (•) after the entry in the list. I would have preferred something more self-apparent as I never was able to guess that. To be fair to Apple, if you search in Font Book’s help for “bullet”, you get the entry “If a dot appears next to a font name”. Make sure you read this entry. The MacFixIt post referenced above says to use the “Resolve Duplicates” feature. What it doesn’t point out (that Font Book’s help does) is that you need to select the version of the font you want to keep. Selecting all fonts under the “All Fonts” collection didn’t work for me; my guess is that it’s indeterminate which font is used since that collection is a mix of the system and user ones.
If you want the system installed versions of fonts to override any others, click on the “Computer” collection, select all the fonts there and then do “Resolve Fonts.” Also, it doesn’t seem that just disabling the fonts does the trick. I had all my user fonts disabled up until now. It was only after I re-enabled them and did the “Resolve Fonts” thing did it all clear up.
I filed this as rdar://5592647 and I have amended it with the info above, for you Apple people keeping score at home.
As with all things (especially when dealing with font stuff on OS X), YMMV.
Category: OS X 3 comments »
December 21st, 2007 at 5:26 am
I’ve seen that happening since Jaguar using Suitcase to manage fonts. A bad version of helvetica will do it with any font management tool. Suitcase however is particularly unhelpful because it can flg a font as clashing with one in the system folder, even if the font isn’t in the system folder.
January 10th, 2008 at 7:32 am
I had the same issue plague me for a couple of days before I figured out it was font related – and yes, it was the same Font – Helvetica Neue – that caused it.
September 20th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
9/20/08 – My problem is that I need to make the
Event Names more readable. I know to use Edit
to “name” the events. How do I proceed from there?
D.