Comments on: Mail.app flips out

By: Sigurdur Armannsson

Sigurdur Armannsson — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 00:10:44 +0000

There is something about the fonts on X. Apple provides us with a plenty of fonts and for most normal home user it’s probably very welcome. But for people doing design this can become a quite confusing situation if they don’t know where all those fonts are situated and for what purpose. One reason is that Apple is using many fonts that are popular in design, like Gill and Helvetica Neue to name only a few. Worse is that some, like Gill Sans are pretty much far from Adobe’s Gill Sans most used in design.

Burning the fonts into ROM or similar action would probably make the situation even worse because then we would be stuck with what Apple provides and not beeing able to get a control over the fonts. I have have been helping many to solve font problems and writing about it on my site (mostly in Icelanic I am afraid). I am afraid there are not so much writing in English on the web about this subject. Or maybe I have missed it?

Anyway, I recommend strongly Linotype FontExplorerX to get control over the fonts. From it you can locate all the fonts on your mac and deal with any conflict. And it’s free btw.

By: Odysseus

Odysseus — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 00:08:42 +0000

I’ve seen this happen in Retrospect, and it had nothing to do with fonts being removed from the System, since none had been removed!

By: mcloki

mcloki — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 23:48:35 +0000

Agree with Sigurdur. Helvetica Neue being removed from the system causes this look. Open address book and if all of your characters are gone with huge leading in between just reload the system fonts.
I’ve done it to myself and it’s just irritating that Apple would even let this happen. Apple should just burn the fonts into ROM so they are always there and available.

By: Sigurdur Armannsson

Sigurdur Armannsson — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 21:23:37 +0000

This thing and/or similar often happen after people have been opening or rather closing fonts that the system requires. It does not have to be the LastResort font. It could also happen after Helvetica Neue has been moved from the system or a new version of it has been opened.

By: James

James — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 19:58:38 +0000

The font seen in the ‘shot is called LastResort. The OS uses this when no other appropriate font can be found/loaded. The actual glyphs displayed indicate what should really be seen in the same spot, so it’s also a troubleshooting tool.

See the entire table of LastResort glyphs at:

http://developer.apple.com/textfonts/LastResortFont/LastResortTable.html

By: Odysseus

Odysseus — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 15:56:01 +0000

I’ve seen this before — in other apps.

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 15:51:52 +0000

I have the same thing happen to my Quicksilver menus. Restarting the app restores the correct characters. Weird.

By: barry

barry — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 15:45:04 +0000

I think it is much more likely that Mail was just trying to print garbage memory as the strings.

By: Phil Sherry

Phil Sherry — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 13:37:37 +0000

Firstly, my .mac account stopped showing, then I couldn’t bring up Mail’s preferences, which is when I pulled the menu down. I force quit the application and relaunched it. It’s working as normal now, but I’m still in a state of “wtf?” as to why it happened.

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 13:01:27 +0000

I’mnot so sure about the ont corruption thing. I have had this happen many times during a period when I was having serious issues with Mail.app. It was crashing at least once a day for me. Sometimes though it would get seriously screwed up like this – every menu did the same thing. My problem stemmed from having a Public Folder area (from my company’s imap exchange server) that had *WAY* too many mailboxes and items (over 50,000). When mail would try to synchronize this, it would regularly hit “too many file handles open” limit of BSD and wham, Mail would go to s*!t. I would have to trash my preferences and reset. I was making me crazy.

My Solution in the end (found somewhere on Mac OS X Hints, was to have my administrator turn off the public folders for me on IMAP. You could also make that folder in the mail folder read only, but that is not as clean.

Hope that helps someone.