Changing Font Suitcase and Outline icons in Panther

[Brett Conlon]

Great news!!!

I have finally been able to resolve one of the many font management issues 
that have plagued me and my designers under OSX (Panther) - that of 
Suitcase and Outline font icons looking the same in the Finder when in 
list view. Normally the only way to see what type of file they are is to 
look at a larger view of the icon or by scrolling the list to the right or 
making the window larger to see the "kind" column. Under OS9 the font 
icons made font management soooo much easier at the desktop.

What I managed to do was replace the FFIL (Suitcase) and PostScript (LWFN) 
icons. Initially I thought they were part of the System but after an 
exhaustive but empty search it hit me that they are actually part of the 
Font Book app.... hence the icons with the little grey book with an F on 
it - DUH!

WHAT I DID:

If you Control-Click on the Font Book app and choose "Show package 
contents" then go into the Contents/Resources folders you will see a 
number of .icns files. I was after the ffil.icns and lwfn.icns files.

I trashed the FFIL icon and then replaced the LWFN icon with the Print 
Centre icon (originally found inside the Print Centre app - be sure to 
COPY the icon out and don't remove it). NOTE: The names of your new icons 
must be the same as the previous ffil and lwfn.icns.

Since making the change and rebooting, Suitcases have reverted to the 
GenericFont icon (which is the corner-turned page with a large blue A on 
it) and the Outlines now all look like little printers. NOTE: The Generic 
Font icon is located in 
System/Library/CoreServices/SystemIcons.bundle/Contents/Resources/GenericFontIcon.icns.

And all I had to do was copy the Font Book app over to the other OSX Macs 
and the change was seen immediately!

Well, that's one hurdle overcome......

Cheers,

Brett