While Font Finagler 1.0 is partially compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), the Font Finagler 1.5 beta is now stable enough that I have updated the 1.0 version to prevent itself from running under Snow Leopard. (In other words, if you download and launch Font Finagler 1.0 in Snow Leopard now, it will prompt you to visit this site to look for an updated version, namely the Font Finagler 1.5 beta (see below)).
Over the past 19 months since the release of Font Finagler 1.0, I have been hard at work on version 1.5, which not only adds support for Snow Leopard, but also the long-anticipated ability to edit font suitcases like you could in Mac OS 9. The rather early release date of Snow Leopard has caught me by surprise, so I will be releasing a series of beta versions of 1.5 until I can complete the font suitcase feature as intended.
Features:
- Built as a Universal Binary to run natively on both PowerPC Macs (G3, G4, G5) and Intel Macs.
- Adds support for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).
- Adds support for cleaning the font cache files of Adobe, QuarkXPress, and Microsoft applications. The method Font Finagler uses to search for these additional files is both incredibly fast and thorough. Font Finagler can often find up to twice the number of font cache files as other applications: potentially thousands of files in seconds. Try a competing application first, and then use Font Finagler to see what files their application missed.
- When cleaning the OS X font cache files, Font Finagler now examines your ~/Library/FontCollections/ folder for any corrupt font collection files and will include these in a clean if needed. Corrupt font collection files can cause Font Book to hang or crash at launch, can cause applications to crash, and can prevent applications from opening the standard Font panel.
- Adds the ability to preserve Font Book’s disabled fonts for the current user when cleaning the OS X font cache files (only applies to Mac OS X 10.4.x and later).
- Adds the ability to preserve Font Book’s external libraries when cleaning the OS X font cache files (only applies to Mac OS X 10.5.x and later).
- Font Finagler now only requires authorization (entering an administrator name and password) if it’s absolutely necessary to successfully clean the font cache files.
- Adds a “Problem Fonts” feature: when you launch Font Finagler, it automatically checks the active fonts on your Mac, and if it identifies any that are known to cause problems, such as Helvetica Fractions or Times Phonetic, it’ll alert you of this. To aid in troubleshooting, Font Finagler provides information about the font’s name, type, location of the font files, and what font manager application (if any) is responsible for activating the font. It also provides the ability to reveal the font files in the Finder and to deactivate the problematic fonts.
- Adds an “OpenType Font Cache Cleaner” feature that’s designed to clean only the OpenType font cache file and doesn’t require a restart. This feature addresses an OS X font-handling bug present in OS X 10.4.7 – 10.4.10 that affects the use of OpenType fonts in certain applications such as QuarkXPress, Macromedia FreeHand, and possibly others. The bug can cause those applications to crash when they try to work with OpenType fonts, and can also lead to a general instability in other applications as well. Many users have found that using Font Finagler to clean the font cache files seems to alleviate the crashing problems at least temporarily. Once they shutdown the machine and start back up, however, the crashing problem returns until the font cache files are cleaned and the Mac restarted. While a daily cleaning of the font cache files prior to shutdown is a possible workaround, it’s rather inconvenient. That’s where “OpenType Font Cache Cleaner” is designed to come in: it can quickly fix the crashing problems with OpenType fonts without requiring a full restart after cleaning. It can also be run automatically at login. (Note: you can permanently avoid this bug by updating to Mac OS X 10.4.11).
- Adds a “Font Icon Helper” feature to make PostScript Type 1 printer fonts easier to recognize. (This feature is the same as in my “Font Book Helper” application, but it fixes the AppleScript error/incompatibility that Font Book Helper had with OS X 10.4).
- Unregistered users can now freely try any and all of Font Finagler’s features, including Administrator-Free Font Cache Cleaner. (Previous versions of Font Finagler required that you be registered in order to use Administrator-Free Font Cache Cleaner).
