[X4U] How to fix a font??? [TAN]

[Judi Sohn]

Brett Conlon said on Tuesday, July 06, 2004 4:10 AM:

> Hi all,
> 
> We have a large job running that requires the font family "Mason".
> Unfortunately we've discovered that the bold versions of each style
> (Regular, Alternate and Super) are playing up. 
> 
> When we PDF any part of the job that contains the bold style it RIPS
> and previews fine in OS9 running distiller 4.5 but our clients cannot
> open the PDF's (they get an error) nor will they Rasterise into
> Photoshop - I get a memory error.   
> 
> I have confirmed the error on my own Mac running OSX (10.3.4) by
> creating a FHand MX file with just the bold text (of each style
> separately) and printing to PDF (Distiller 6) and it won't open at
> all into Acrobat - gives a font error "Cannot extract the embedded
> font MasonAlternateBold...." and I get an empty page.    

What are you using for font management? There's Font Doctor
http://www.morrisonsoftdesign.com/fd_mac.html which is sold separately and
is also bundled with Suitcase (I think). It may be able to repair the
damage. Font Agent Pro does a good job of font checking, but it will
probably just spit the font back without repair. You may get lucky though. I
haven't heard of folks who have had much luck repairing a font themselves
once it shows signs of corruption like you describe.

Is this http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/emigre/mason/ the font? If so, it's not
that expensive. It may be worth it to re-purchase it, or better yet, contact
the original source that you purchased it from and explain what happened. If
they can pull up your proof of purchase, they'll probably let you redownload
it.

And this is probably a good time for an important word: Backup. I have a CD
that is just my fonts in good condition just in case something like this
should happen to me. Fonts get corrupted all the time, and through the years
I've had to go back to my backup for a fresh font a few times.

-- 
Judi Sohn                                    Mom at Home Design
judi at momathome.com                http://www.momathome.com
AIM/iChat: JudiS217