Part of Nobumi Iyanaga's website. n-iyanag@nifty.com. 11/14/07.

logo picture

Font Problems in OS 10.4.x and later

I experienced some serious font problems when I upgraded from OS 10.4.7 to 10.4.8 -- or perhaps from 10.4.8 to 10.4.9 (I don't remember exactly): anyway, suddenly, some old fonts which were working before stopped working in OS X applications.

The affected fonts are some of the old diacritical fonts which were created in Classic Mac OS days (most likely with Fontographer). The problems are of two different kinds:

  1. Fonts that I had in Classic OS System Folder's Fonts folder -- which were working both in Classic OS applications and OS X applications -- stopped working in OS X applications: the most notable in this case was the Appeal font, but perhaps other fonts, such as Norman, etc., had the same problem.
  2. Another problem is that some fonts (especially the Hobogirin font, and also the font that I created myself, ITimesSkRom) began to present some encoding problems (some of the diacritical glyphs were not the correct ones...).

I investigated these problems, and found the solutions.

For the first problem -- that of Appeal (and perhaps others), what you have to do is to put the same font in the Fonts folder, in your Library. Practically, you will:

Now, you should be able to use again Appeal in your OS X applications.

For the second problem, this is more complicated: it seems that the encoding glitches in these fonts (Hobogirin and ITimesSkRom) are due to some bugs in older versions of Fontographer. I had to re-generate these fonts using FontForge; you will leave these fonts in your Classic System Folder's Fonts folder, and install anew the newly generated fonts that I distribute at the bottom of this page. These are TrueType fonts with the extension .dfont, encoded in Unicode (BMP).

By the way, the font ITimesSkRom had another problem in OS X applications: it was named simply "I"; with the newly generated font, this problem should be fixed as well.

Here is a list of wrongly encoded code points in the font ITimesSkRom. I put this list here simply for record:


Incorrect mapping of old Mac Font to Unicode:

0xB7 (decimal 183), Option + w: should be mapped at 0x2211 (N-ARY SUMMATION) but is mapped at 0x03A3 (GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SIGMA) 0xDB (decimal 219), Shift + Option + 2: should be mapped at 0x20AC (EURO SIGN) but is mapped at 0x00A4 (CURRENCY SIGN) 0xDE (decimal 222), Shift + Option + 5: should be mapped at 0xFB01 (LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FI) but is mapped at 0xF001 (Private Use Area) 0xDF (decimal 223), Shift + Option + 6: should be mapped at 0xFB02 (LATIN SMALL LIGATURE FL) but is mapped at 0xF002 (Private Use Area) 0xF0 (decimal 240), Shift + Option + k: should be mapped at 0xF8FF (Private Use Area: Apple logo) but is mapped at 0xF000 (Private Use Area) 0xF6 (decimal 246), Shift + Option + i: should be mapped at 0x02C6 (MODIFIER LETTER CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT) but is mapped at 0x0302 (COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT) (the same glyph must be in both code points) 0xF7 (decimal 247), Shift + Option + n: should be mapped at 0x02DC (SMALL TILDE) but is mapped at 0x0303 (COMBINING TILDE) (the same glyph must be in both code points) 0xF8 (decimal 248), Shift + Option + -: should be mapped at 0x00AF(MACRON) but is mapped at 0x02C9 (MODIFIER LETTER MACRON) (the same glyph must be in both code points) 0xFD (decimal 253), Shift + Option + g: should be mapped at 0x02DD (DOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT) but is mapped at 0x02BA (MODIFIER LETTER DOUBLE PRIME)

New as of November 12 2007:
I noticed that two other code points in Hobogirin were affected by the same problem. I corrected these two code points. I hope this time, the font would work without problem in OS 10.4.x and later.


Download


I would appreciate any feedback, bug report or suggestions.
Thank you in advance.

Have fun!


Go to Research tools Home Page
Go to NI Home Page


Mail to Nobumi Iyanaga


frontierlogo picture

This page was last built with Frontier on a Macintosh on Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 4:45:03 PM. Thanks for checking it out! Nobumi Iyanaga