In my last post on Font­Ex­plorer, Tran­si­tion­ing to Font­Ex­plorer X, I alluded to some prob­lems I was having with it and Quark 6.5. I’d like to expound upon that a little bit.

In order to get on the same page, I want to define some stan­dard font man­age­ment ter­mi­nol­ogy first. I am talk­ing about using OS X in this post, but many of the more gen­eral con­cepts prob­a­bly apply to font man­age­ment on Win­dows machines as well.

System Font Fold­ers:

OS X comes with three default font fold­ers, each serv­ing a dif­fer­ent pur­pose:

/System/Library/Fonts/:

Con­tains all fonts nec­es­sary for the oper­at­ing system to run. Font stored here are acces­si­ble to all users on the system.

/Library/Fonts/:

Con­tains most fonts nec­es­sary for stan­dard appli­ca­tions to run. Font stored here are acces­si­ble to all users on the system.

/Users/<username>/Library/Fonts/:

Con­tains fonts only acces­si­ble to a single user.

Font Database:

This is the folder that your font man­age­ment appli­ca­tion stores your fonts in. This folder can be called any number of things, stored in any number of file for­mats, and in any number of loca­tions. It all depends on the par­tic­u­lar font man­age­ment appli­ca­tion and your setup. The impor­tant thing to remem­ber is that this folder is dis­tinct from all of the system font folders.

Auto-​Activation of Fonts:

This hap­pens when you open a doc­u­ment or appli­ca­tion and your font man­age­ment soft­ware inter­cepts a call for a font that is not cur­rently acti­vated. The font man­age­ment soft­ware then acti­vates the font for you. This can be done either through inter­cept­ing a system-​wide call for a font or via a plugin.

Manual Acti­va­tion of Fonts:

This is when you use your font man­age­ment soft­ware to acti­vate one or more fonts. After man­u­ally acti­vat­ing a font, it will be avail­able to all appli­ca­tions on the system until the font is deactivated.

Auto-​Activation Plug-​In

A Plug-​In that auto-​activates fonts that are requested by an appli­ca­tion. These plu­g­ins are writ­ten for a spe­cific appli­ca­tion (usu­ally ones like Quark and InDesign).

Cur­rently I am using Font­Ex­plorer 1.1.2 and Quark 6.5.2. I have also tested these prob­lems using Quark 6, Quark 6.1, and Quark 6.5 and gotten the same results.

In the first ver­sions of Font­Ex­plorer there seemed to be some spo­radic prob­lems with the auto-​activation plugin for Quark 6.5. Some­times it would work fine, but other times the font either wouldn’t acti­vate at all, or only parts of the type­face would acti­vate. Often times there were prob­lems with the italic ver­sions of type­faces. For what­ever reason I also seemed to have a par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult time with Univers 39. Since I’ve installed Font­Ex­plorer 1.1 (and up), which includes ver­sion 1.24 of the Quark 6.5 plugin, things seemed to be going very well with auto-​activation. In fact, I haven’t noticed any prob­lems with auto-​activation in Quark 6.5 using Font­Ex­plorer X 1.1 and up.

The real prob­lems between Font­Ex­plorer and Quark seem to happen when fonts are man­u­ally acti­vated. A normal work­flow for cre­at­ing a Quark doc­u­ment should go some­thing like this:

1. Open Font Man­age­ment application
2. Acti­vate desired fonts
3. Open Quark
4. Create a new document

All of the fonts that you acti­vated should be avail­able in Quark’s font menu at this point. In an ideal world, you should also be able to acti­vate and use addi­tional fonts with­out having to quit Quark. Clearly though, this is not an ideal world.

Unfor­tu­nately, in this case, after fol­low­ing the steps listed above, many¹ of the fonts simply do not show up in the Quark font menu. There is no log­i­cal reason for this that I can figure out. The prob­lem is repro­ducible. I’ve iso­lated two fonts that always have this prob­lem: Duc De Berry LT Std and Serlio LT Std (both Open­Type). Also, no amount of quit­ting Quark, deac­ti­vat­ing and then reac­ti­vat­ing the fonts or clean­ing the font caches will work. The fonts simply will not show up in Quark.

Curi­ously, if you take one of these prob­lem­atic fonts and copy it to any of the system font fold­ers (may require a restart), the font appears in Quark with­out a prob­lem. Great, but this doesn’t help us, since we’re cir­cum­vent­ing the whole ‘font management’ thing entirely by doing this. Remem­ber, the whole reason why we’re using font man­age­ment soft­ware is because we have lots of fonts, too many to leave acti­vated all of the time.

I strug­gled with this prob­lem for quite some time look­ing for pos­si­ble solu­tions or workarounds. I even tried pulling out my hair, but that didn’t seem to work either. Search­ing for the prob­lem yielded only a couple of results. Over on the Font­Ex­plorer dis­cus­sion board, there were a couple of posts with sim­i­lar prob­lems (no solutions):

• QuarkX­press 6.52 Does Not See Acti­vated Fonts
• Prob­lems with (How I hate) Quark 6.1

On Cre­ative Guy, there are some inter­est­ing tips for fonts in Quark. They sounded promis­ing, but didn’t fix this par­tic­u­lar problem:

• More Quark font issue fixes
• Miss­ing fonts in the Quark XPress font menu

Finally I found this post on Jason Santa Maria. The post itself isn’t that inter­est­ing, the com­ments are where it gets good.