OS X 10.5 font woes

[nmg]

Since moving to a Mac a bit over a year ago, I've had only a few reasons to look back ( the business with the HP LJ1022 printer being one of them). I'm now rather close to the end of my tether, and the reason is fonts.

As an academic and a computer scientist, I end up writing quite a lot of papers and presentations with maths in them. Like any

Comments

[anonymous]

Yes, looks like this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX9kc1ZDI7U

>> I really don't see how Apple could have let a release out of the door with a bug like this - this is surely a critical bug for anyone in publishing.

Perhaps they didn't see it?

[nmg]

It isn't just there for LaTeX users, though.

There's a chance that it may be an artifact of a frotzed upgrade to 10.5; I've not yet found anyone with the bug who did a clean install, or an archive and reinstall.

[lionsphil]

Have you tried asking osx-users? That's got a mixture.

[nmg]

Good call. I really needed a kick like this to get around to subscribing to it.

[purplecthulhu]

Which latex version are you using? Have you had a look at their help pages?

I've not moved to leopard yet so can't test this for you, but if it's real it might make me wait a bit longer for a fix...

[nmg]

I'm using MacTeX, which is a largely repackaged version of TeXlive. It's the most recent version, so it's based on TeXLive 2007.

Regardless, I believe that this *isn't* a TeX problem; one of my colleagues reported similar behaviour with the PDF guidelines for our new corporate identity (don't ask). This too contained embedded Type1 fonts, and shows similar behaviour.

[purplecthulhu]

A quick google finds this which might help...

http://macresearch.org/fixing-broken-latex-fonts-leopard

[nmg]

It's not a permanent fix; I've already tried purging the font cache, but the problem comes back after a moderate amount of activity.

[lionsphil]

Here's the extreme case I mentioned.

(P.S. Do you think I should make my minithesis more readable?)

[alex_holden]

Some interesting related videos are showing up next to your YouTube video about LaTeX...

[lionsphil]

See, this just proves that we need the Semantic Web, not the text-scraping web of Google.

[nmg]

Hmmm. Do you want to pass your transfer viva? :)

[blue_condition]

kpathsea (the library TeX uses to find fonts) is pretty horrific. It works, sort of. I'd guess at problems with that.

[nmg]

It isn't kpathsea. TeX produces a working DVI file without problems, and dvips produces a working PostScript file from that DVI which a) renders correctly in ghostscript and b) when translated to PDF via ps2pdf (or pstopdf), renders correctly in Acrobat.

I see the same problem with other PDF files (not produced by TeX) that contain embedded Type1 fonts, so I'm guessing that it's an issue with the font cache maintained by Apple Type Services.

[hatter]

Best font cache bug I saw was something subtler, where the glyph for 7 was replaced by the glyph for 9. Write 1234567879 in one font, select, change to something else and it became 123456989. 9+9=16; 3+4=9.

http://onestepback.org/index.cgi/Tech/Mac/MyMacCantCount.red (via comp.risks)

the hatter

[nmg]

That's inspired...