[XeTeX] Bug in MacOSX 10.6.2 Hoefler font

[Herbert Schulz]

On Nov 19, 2009, at 10:28 AM, Axel Kielhorn wrote:

> There have been reports on this list about problems with the Hoefler font on MacOS X 10.6.2.
> 
> Mac OSX Hints reports today:
> 
> http://feeds.macosxhints.com/click.phdo?i=83230c793af567737f76ed2fb1a01358
> 
> <quote>
> Recently, I was asked to set up a web site for a church; since I didn't want to spend days doing it, I decided to try iWeb. 
> 
> Things worked well until I updated to 10.6.2. Suddenly, iWeb was crashing on startup, without fail. Fortunately, someone on the Apple forums figured out a work-around. 
> 
> If you've been getting crashes with iWeb or Pages that blame the SFWordProcessing Plug In, try using Font Book to disable the font named Hoefler. Even though Font Book insists the font is valid, it appears to be triggering the crash. 
> 
> Once the font is disabled, you will be able to launch iWeb (and Pages) again without crashing -- although all occurrences of the Hoefler font will be rendered incorrectly. 
> </quote>
> 
> This does not really help, but at least it seems the bug is not in xdvipdfmx or xdvi2pdf.
> 
> Axel,
> with Hoefler Text 6.1d7e1 from the combo updater.
> 

Howdy,

That article refers to some discussion on the Apple Forums. One of the suggestions on the Forum was to simply do a safe boot (hold the Shift key when booting), log in and the reboot normally. This will clean out many system caches. Now using xelatex (with xdvipdfmx back end) seems to work again but xdv2pdf is still crashing under 10.6.2 (Combo Installer --- xetex itself was crashing when I did a simple install --- I wonder if the technique above would have fixed that crash!?)

I had to force a re-open of .tex files by TeXShop but that wasn't painful and they all got their normal TeXShop .tex icon when I changed a single file via the Get Info... for that file. You may also get a one time dialog box opening some documents in some applications which you get from the clearing out of the Launch Services cache.

So, no more need for the Hoefler Text and Gill Sans dfont files --- I hope.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)