Installing fonts pre-Panther

[mectojic]

I've been messing around with Jaguar and Puma for a bit of nostalgia and fun; there's something really neat about this early Aqua UI. I've installed Microsoft Office X and some other apps, and was even able to stream some music from my home server through 0.7.0 VLC, not bad!

I'm stuck on installing new fonts, though. These releases predate Panther's FontBook, which is all I'm familiar with.

I tried dragging the fonts into the User/Library/Fonts folder. They show up as detected, but when I try to type with them, they default to another font.
I then tried out Extensis Suitcase 10, but I don't really have much experience with it. When I try to activate a font, it says the font clashes with another font in the System Folder, and needs to be deleted. But I had already deleted those fonts...

The fonts I'm attempting to install are TTF format. I've had success using these same fonts under 10.4 Tiger, when installed through Font Book. Is it possible that some TTF fonts don't work with the older versions of OSX?

 

[eyoungren]

I've been messing around with Jaguar and Puma for a bit of nostalgia and fun; there's something really neat about this early Aqua UI. I've installed Microsoft Office X and some other apps, and was even able to stream some music from my home server through 0.7.0 VLC, not bad!

I'm stuck on installing new fonts, though. These releases predate Panther's FontBook, which is all I'm familiar with.

I tried dragging the fonts into the User/Library/Fonts folder. They show up as detected, but when I try to type with them, they default to another font.
I then tried out Extensis Suitcase 10, but I don't really have much experience with it. When I try to activate a font, it says the font clashes with another font in the System Folder, and needs to be deleted. But I had already deleted those fonts...

The fonts I'm attempting to install are TTF format. I've had success using these same fonts under 10.4 Tiger, when installed through Font Book. Is it possible that some TTF fonts don't work with the older versions of OSX?

TTF fonts will work. They worked in OS9.

There are two other Fonts folders and are Macintonsh HD>Library>Fonts and Macintosh HD>System>Library>Fonts. The first is available to all users (the one you installed to is only for your user account) and the second is system level fonts. You do not want to be messing very much in the one in the system folder as moving any fonts out of there can prevent the system from booting.

You may have fonts in the Macintosh HD>Library>Fonts folder that are conflicting.

Lastly, font managers. Basically font managers (such as Suitcase) allow you to put fonts anywhere and then have the manager make them available to the user. Generally, when using a font manager I create font folders in the Macintosh HD>Users>Shared folder. That way these fonts are available to all users and the font manager has one font location.

With Suitcase you can create sets of fonts, that is fonts that you want for a specific purpose. Mostly people create folders of fonts for that and then just drop the folder into Suitcase to create a set and import the fonts. Suitcase may be a bit confused because it recognizes all the font folders as User, Library and System fonts. When you drop fonts into those locations they become instantly active, so having a font manager try and activate already activated fonts could be confusing it.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

You do not want to be messing very much in the one in the system folder as moving any fonts out of there can prevent the system from booting.

OMG...

 

[eyoungren]

OMG...

OK, some. Not all. You can get away with moving a few out. But there are some you shouldn't mess with.

 

[mectojic]

It just doesn't work for me. Weird. I do get a 'warning' when installing the fonts under Tiger, but I just dismiss that and they work normally. In Puma though, I put the ttf files in my user fonts folder, and nothing.

 

[mectojic]

Update: turns out the fonts works in Jaguar, but not in Puma. That'll do for me!

I'm pretty sure Jaguar had a lot of under-the-hood improvements and adoptions of industry standards (e.g. Mpeg-4). Perhaps these forms of TTF fonts were one of them?

 

[eyoungren]

Update: turns out the fonts works in Jaguar, but not in Puma. That'll do for me!

I'm pretty sure Jaguar had a lot of under-the-hood improvements and adoptions of industry standards (e.g. Mpeg-4). Perhaps these forms of TTF fonts were one of them?

I'm a graphic designer and working with fonts is a major part of what I do. That was with both OS9 and briefly with Jaguar, then up. I never used Puma for any sort of production work and most designers agree that it wasn't until Jaguar that design apps became viable on OS X.

So, I suppose you are correct. There were a couple years where you still couldn't do a few things with OS X that you could with OS9.

 

[mectojic]

I'm a graphic designer and working with fonts is a major part of what I do. That was with both OS9 and briefly with Jaguar, then up. I never used Puma for any sort of production work and most designers agree that it wasn't until Jaguar that design apps became viable on OS X.

So, I suppose you are correct. There were a couple years where you still couldn't do a few things with OS X that you could with OS9.

Yep, that's probably it. Most serious work was done in OS9 until Jaguar was out; after all, there was practically nothing you could do in OSX until all the major developers had their apps ported over. Looks like that fits your story too!

I had this nostalgic hit for the hybrid UI of Puma; especially the happy Mac at the start, and the similar window animations from OS9. It was all very awesome. Anyway, Jaguar is still itching that feeling for me, so I'm happy. Enjoying fonts in Office 2004, then I messed around a bit with Keynote 1.0 and Safari 1.0.

I must say, I especially love Keynote 1.0. It's like the ultimate piece of simplicity in software; you're literally straight into the app and making slides, it was wonderful.

 

[eyoungren]

There was a short period of time where I was working with QuarkXPress 4.11 in Classic while running on Jag. I believe either Suitcase 10 or X1 (one of the two, but maybe both) was able to bridge fonts on OS X in to Classic. It was a kludgy thing but I was able to get work done. I was eventually upgraded to QXP 6.0 and was able to abandon Classic entirely for design apps. Still had to use it for one other particular app back then, but was able to shove that off on to another Mac running Tiger.