Comment by coldtea
8 years ago
>All sorts of problems installing this on OSX
Like what? Installed it with absolutely no problem at all in both Sierra and High Sierra (GM) -- and never had issues installing it in my older Mac OSes (or any other font -- some fonts created by amateurs --free .ttf varieties-- have broken metrics/config and you're warned about it sometimes. Other than that, absolutely zero issues).
>to be fair, the process for installing fonts on OSX is horrible anyway
It's literally double clicking on a font file and clicking "Install Font" on the preview that pops up.
How is that in any way "horrible"?
UPDATE (& TL;DR & Introduction!): Killing Font Book between operations avoids all sorts of errors and weird display issues you'll get if you try to install multiple font files in a single 'session'. Open Font Book from fresh, locate font files in Finder, drag them into it and you'll do everything in one operation, and it will even update to show you what's happened!
> Like what?
Errors about duplicate fonts. Several occasions where dialogs open and close immediately, indicating some kind of problem, but not sure what. Even after going through the "yes, please do really install this font, even though there are 'duplicate fonts'", nothing seems to happen sometimes.
I've managed to install three of the fonts (font variants?) — Regular, Bold, and Bold Italic — but Italic refuses to install altogether.
> How is that in any way "horrible"?
Having to open four separate font files, then click a button each time to actually install them seems like a pretty tortuous process — I'm grateful it was only 4! It would be a LOT nicer if I could just select the files, right-click and choose "Install font(s)" and have it all done in a single step. That's totally aside from all the errors.
Having said that ... pro-tip: drag-and-drop. I always forget that drag-and-drop is sometimes the 'first class' way of doing something on OSX. So the quickest way, I think, would be:
1. Open 'Font Book' 2. Locate files in Finder 3. Drag and drop from the latter to the former
This process finally allowed the "Italic" variant to be installed. I'm assuming it will work with multiple variants at once; I would test that, but trying to remove the family/variants in Font Book just gives me a 'no-op' (after a confirmation dialog).
>UPDATE (& TL;DR & Introduction!): Killing Font Book between operations avoids all sorts of errors and weird display issues you'll get if you try to install multiple font files in a single 'session'. Open Font Book from fresh, locate font files in Finder, drag them into it and you'll do everything in one operation, and it will even update to show you what's happened!
Oh, I rarely happened to need to install multiple files in the same Font Book "session". At best 4-5 files for the different fonts of the same family (X bold, X italic, etc) -- might be why I'm not seeing those issues.
>Having to open four separate font files, then click a button each time to actually install them seems like a pretty tortuous process
Having been there in 1997-200x era Linux, where you had to manually edit config files and jump through hoops to register fonts (and they wouldn't even work across all desktop environments and toolkits) I really don't see the issue...
That said, you can just drag and drop multiple font files into Font Book if I'm not mistaken. In fact, you could just drop them into your Fonts folder and they should work too -- no clicking required -- don't know if Apple removed that, used to work at least in Snow Leopard days.
> At best 4-5 files for the different fonts of the same family
That was exactly the case in this instance :)
> Having been there in ...
Sure, I don't think I've ever had a great experience installing fonts on any platform, but I hold Apple to a higher standard.
> That said, you can just drag and drop ...
I know, I said that in my update that you quoted! :-)
You never get it complaining about duplicate names that aren't, or have to kill and restart Font Book after installing each font because otherwise it will silently fail to install the next one? You never have it pick a random display for the "font problems" dialog, and then open that dialog buried under every other window on the display?
It was fine in Mavericks. In Sierra it has been a minor player among a very sizable collection of annoyances.
> kill and restart Font Book
Thank you! TBF to OSX, it at least says something about general reliability that I didn't even consider this would be necessary.
Most welcome! And, yeah, it was kind of a desperation move on my part, but I've found Sierra and the 2016 15" Touch Bar model to be a major regression in that regard. Took most of a week to get external displays to work sort of reliably, and even still I get a hard lock and have to power-cycle if I incautiously plug in the displays before waking the machine.