Fix Font Problems Correctly
Those who have worked with fonts for a long time have developed a lore about them, and how to handle them successfully. One of these pieces of knowledge is that if you’re having font problems (fonts which don’t display correctly, for example), a possible solution is to delete the AdobeFnt files on your computer. I was reminded of this because of a post this week by Adobe’s resident font guru, Thomas Phinney, on his blog.
What are these mysterious files which appear in odd places in your computer? For example, when I did a search this morning on my computer, here’s a partial list of what I found:
SearchAdobeFnt Files
It turns out that these are font cache files. Your operating system and Adobe’s own font technology (used in all the Adobe Creative Suite applications) create cache files to make font display faster. It’s rather a rare event, but because these files may be updated and modified, it’s possible that they, like all files on your computer, may get corrupted. The symptoms of corruption might be a font which displays incorrectly. (This can also be caused by a corrupted font as well. But that would require a separate article!)
You can freely delete font cache files because the operating system or the Adobe font mechanism automatically generates new ones when it needs them. Thomas’ post is to tell you how to correctly delete these files. If you do a search like I did, you’ll see a large number of files with the extension *.lst. These are the font cache files which you may want to delete.
The confusion is that there are also two files whose names begin with AdobeFnt, which you don’t want to delete. One of them is the AdobeFnt.db file I’ve circled in the illustration above. The other is the FntNames.db file. For the archane details of what these files do, I’ll refer you to Thomas’ blog entry.
But there’s nothing wrong with having these files! They normally do no harm, and they probably speed up your font display. You only need to delete them in the event you were having a problem.
Just a note that the comment about “you only need to delete them in the event you were having a problem” could potentially be construed as applying to the above mentioned AdobeFnt.db and FntNames.db, which would be a mistake. There is nothing wrong with purging the AdobeFnt*.lst files (or any other font cache file from Apple, Microsoft, etc.), but you may need to restart applications (or your OS) afterwards so they can be recreated (e.g., you don’t want to purge the font caches while an application that may be using them is active).
I like using FontNuke to remove (delete) font caches.
I’ve been told by a reliable source that it is possible to identify the corrupted ones by their size. If they look bigger than all the others by an obvious lead, say 100kb, then ditch them. The source told me that they can casue all kids of erratic behavious in Illustrator and even in the OS itself. (PS Thanks for a great site!)
U usually don’t need to be so extreeme. A luxury problem is that programs don’t crash “enough” so that cashed files are deleted, but the program still needs them. If InDesign or a CS app is open for more than a couple of days u may just need to quit & start the application, restarting the computer 2 times a week is can save many headaches (I remember having to restart a couple of times to open a file
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Since I installed InDesign 2CS, I have never been able to open a document by double-clicking on the icon. I have to go through the program: file, open and then click on the icon. It’s rather frustrating. Any suggestions are welcome.
(P.S. What a wonderful and informative website. Thank you.)
Truus,
You may have the wrong file association between an InDesign file and the application. However, the way you would fix this would be different depending on your operating system. Are you on Mac or PC?
I go with deleting any that are over 100K personally. That seems to fix SOME of my font issues.
Tim Macking - MCSE
I have found Font Nuke to be invaluable as well. Sometime a font will refuse to load in InDesign, even after reseting OS X’s font cache by rebooting into safe mode. Running Font Nuke fixes the problem. I’ll try manually deleting some of these various font caches to see if there is one in particular that is causing this problem.
Since using InDesign CS3, when I print a document originally made in CS2, the text is smaller than previous CS2 copies.
Any comments would be welcome.
The text prints smaller?! Wow, that’s odd. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps Scale to Fit got turned on in your Print dialog box somehow. (And so the page might get scaled down at print time.)
Recently I have had a font problem. My equation editor in msword 2003 is not displaying the equations I am writing. I am not a computer person but I would appreciate a fix to this problem. I am writing a maths book and I am anxious hours of work have go to waste. Please help.
Tom, are you saying the equations don’t appear in InDesign properly? Or that they don’t appear in MS Word properly? We’re an InDesign site, so I’m guessing we won’t be able to help you with the latter.
We are having a problem getting ITC Garamond 1 to work properly with InDesign CS3. The bold shows up in suitcase and font book, but will not appear in the font list of InDesign. The light, light italic and bold italic appear to work okay.
While using InDesign CS2, whenever I type the letters F and L together with the Clarendon Condensed font, the letters do not print. Any ideas how to resolve this issue?
Tim, does it print correctly from any other application? Perhaps that font doesn’t have an fl ligature? Try putting a little kerning between the two letters to break the ligature apart?
100k is the limit for me. It seems to give me the least amount of problems and following this guideline makes everything just run better.