Font Corruption

When good fonts go bad: how font corruption can derail your workflow

It starts off really innocently. “Oh this document looks a little off,” you think. “Maybe I just need to ratchet the point size down one. That’ll fix it.” Or a very generic looking error appears when you’re in the middle of something and it doesn’t sound serious so you dismiss it and move on.

It starts off really innocently. “Oh this document looks a little off,” you think. “Maybe I just need to ratchet the point size down one. That’ll fix it.” Or a very generic looking error appears when you’re in the middle of something and it doesn’t sound serious so you dismiss it and move on.

Next thing you know nothing looks right, documents are reflowing all over the place, and some of what you’re looking at doesn’t even look like English! Welcome to the land of Corrupted Fonts. You will not enjoy your stay.

How do you resolve this? Your best bet is to restore from backup (you DO have your fonts backed up, don’t you?) and then re-open documents that were affected and make sure they are displaying properly. Your next question is probably “OK I know how to fix it, but how do I keep it from happening in the first place?” That answer is a bit trickier. Font corruption can be caused by a myriad of issues – from orphaned PostScript pairs, to issues resulting from the font’s construction or system crashes or any of a whole stack of other contributing factors.

Continues @http://blog.extensis.com/?p=2716