I really hoped that this Macintosh font crap was behind us with the advent of OS X. To be sure, OS 9 could be brought to its knees by a corrupt font, trashing all your work in the process, but OS X? C’mon! Who has heard of fonts giving Unix any grief? I have read the occasional reports of some people having trouble when deleting Helvetica or replacing it with another Helvetica and this was somewhat understandable. So today when things got wacky, bad fonts came to mind.

I performed a fresh install of 10.3 onto a eMac. Wiped the drive. On first reboot installed 10.3.4 combo updater. On second reboot, I installed all the remaining updates. Next, firewired the old iMac and copied all the old OS 9 files over. Then decided to fire up Safari to install Acrobat Reader … Safari crashed on start. So I rebuilt permissions … nope. Reinstalled 10.3.4 … nope. Hmmm, fonts. Opened Font Book, something like 116 fonts. Where the hell did all these fonts come from. So disabled them all, then enabled the set that Apple says are needed, and fired up Safari … it started. Then in groups I started to re-enable fonts. In the end, these were the culprits … Classical Ornaments SWA, Elemento SWA, ITC Zapf Dingbats SWA, More Wingbats SWM, Symbol Set SWA. If anyone knows what App installs these bastards, please let me know. If anyone else is having trouble with Apple Apps, look for these fonts.

And Apple, for the love of Pete, FIX THIS. It’s 2004 fer crissakes! How about a little message like “Oh, I can’t load a font “Blah Blah”. Please disable or repair this font.” This would be much better than the huge crash report that looks like something far more serious.