Dealing with Corrupted Fonts

While Apple’s OS X has reduced crashes – and in many cases, eliminated them – there’s still one OS 9 problem that can cause quirky behavior on your Mac desktop or laptop, and that’s corrupted fonts. In some instances, they may be fonts you imported after upgrading from OS 9, and now that you’re running OS X, they can come back to haunt you. But there’s an easy way to determine which font (or fonts) are the culprit. Launch Font Book, which should be in your Applications folder. Go to Font Book’s File menu and select Validate Fonts, which brings up a window showing all your installed fonts. If OS X is happy with them, it places a round check mark to the right. Suspect fonts get a round yellow symbol with a black exclamation point in it; this indicates that particular font may have problems. For truly trashed fonts, you’ll get a red dot with an “X” in it. This means there are serious problems and you should trash the font immediately. You might be surprised at how well your Mac now runs!