Fonts have got to be the bane of my exis­tence. I manage an all-​mac com­puter lab for a col­lege. We have a graphic design pro­gram in the depart­ment, so we run Quark, InDe­sign and Font Explorer X. We also own the Adobe Font Folio (open type edi­tion) Library.

Since we got this type library, I’ve had noth­ing but prob­lems in our labs. We used to run Font Reserve, but I got fed up with having to script around the fact that it was never deac­ti­vat­ing fonts like it was sup­posed to. With a 1000+ font library and lots of users, that’s a prob­lem. Try having a PR major wait two min­utes for Word to open, and then bitch you out for it.

I like Font Explorer X a lot, but installing it in our labs hasn’t come with­out it’s fair share of prob­lems. The biggest thing right now though is that Quark 6.5 just refuses to play nice with any of the other soft­ware. Sup­pos­edly 7 is better, but since they released it a month after our bud­get­ing cycle ended, we’re stuck with 6.5 at least until next summer.

Latest Prob­lem: All of those True Type fonts that come preintstalled with Tiger (and Office) I can’t get rid of. They are all always acti­vated, except that Quark appar­ently doesn’t like the Italic ver­sions. This is a real prob­lem because the stu­dents get con­fused and don’t real­ize that the true type is not the open type. They don’t see an italic listed in Quark so most just assume it doesn’t exist until their graphic design pro­fes­sor yells at them. Yuck.

I need the font insan­ity to stop. Now.