Please Help with FONT PANEL etc

[Liza]

After realising that a particular font wasn't showing up in Word 2004 I started looking into things:

I do some graphic design so I have many fonts, and from what I'd searched it seems these long lists of them (and probably me putting them in the wrong collections of the Font Book) were creating part of the problem. Went to Font Book and removed all of the fonts I'd added, making sure that what was left were only the fonts in the font folders (/system/library/fonts and ~/library/fonts). Also made sure fonts weren't duplicated, etc. Quit everything, logged off, restarted, opened Word, but still had this looong list of fonts, which are now not in the Font Book?!

Also realised that strange things are now happening in Entourage and Safari, because I can't read half of what's going on.

Searched the forums here and elsewhere again, tried trashing all sorts of font caches based on the info I found, quit everything, logged off, restarted, opened Word, but same problem! And, btw, still have the same problem with Entourage and Safari.

Then... I discovered the FONT PANEL. This little baby still has all the fonts I removed, in the All Fonts collection, and I can only assume that this is why they keep showing up elsewhere. All the info I've found says that to delete fonts you have to do so from the Font Book (done, but they're still in the Font Panel), and there apparently seems to be no way to delete fonts from the All Fonts collection of the Font Panel.

And I still can't read half of the text in Entourage and Safari!

I'm on a Mac Mini
OS X.4.2

Any advice will be much appreciated

[perfessor101]

Apple Knowledge Base article 301332 contains lists of the Tiger fonts that cannot be disabled and what directory they are supposed to appear in. Which is where I would start if I were you.

Apple Knowledge Base article 301245 discusses an issue with the Helvetica Fractions font that causes problems that you may be describing in Safari and Entourage.

If you are serious about graphic design and have hundreds of fonts to manage, Apple's Font Book will likely prove inadequate to the task. Products such as Extensis Suitcase. You still need to pay attention to Apple's "must not be disabled" constraints.

[Liza]

Thanks, perf - I did come across both those articles in my hours of searching. I made sure that I have the fonts Tiger needs, and I don't have the Helvetica problem either.

Will look into the Extensis suggestion once all of this is resolved, because I literally have thousands of fonts.

[Liza]

It might not be the ideal solution or everybody's cup of tea, but take a look here to see some possible solution/s, and how I decided to solve my problem.