Archive for the ‘Troubleshooting Knowledge Base’ Category
Clean Your Font Caches with FontExplorer X
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
FontExplorer X, and the later versions called FontExplorer X Pro (http://www.fontexplorerX.com) include the tools you need to clean your font caches. Here’s how.
Cleaning the System Font Caches
1. With FontExplorer’s window on your screen, click Clean system font caches… in the Tools menu.
2. In recent versions of FontExplorer X Pro, a window appears asking for your password. Older versions simply skip to the window in step 3. If the password window appears, simply enter your password and click the OK button.
3. The next window lists the actual files that make up the Mac OS X font caches. Click the Clean button.
4. At this point all versions of FontExplorer X and FontExplorer X Pro display the window asking for your password. Enter the password and click the OK button. The caches files are deleted and you’ll see the window displayed in the next step.
5. Cleaning Mac OS X font caches requires a restart, so once the files are deleted this window appears. Click the Restart button to restart your Mac, then go on to the next step.
Adobe, Microsoft, and Quark maintain their own font caches separately from the System font caches. FontExplorer
6. When the Mac reboots, launch Linotype FontExplorer again. This time, click Clean application font caches… in the Tools menu.
7. The next window lists Adobe’s, Quark’s and Microsoft’s font caches, and they’re clicked by default. Click the Clean… button.
NOTE: If you don’t happen to have any Adobe, Quark, or Microsoft products installed on your Mac, those selections will appear grayed out in the window.
8. You’ll see the window asking for your password. Enter the password and click the OK button.
9. The application font caches are deleted and you’ll see this confirmation window.
10. Last step. Just click the OK button in the box that says the font caches have been successfully removed. Now launch your programs and see if the fonts look as they should.
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Clean Your Font Caches with Font Finagler
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
If you use FontBook (the font manager that comes with Mac OS X), Extensis Suitcase, or other font manager software that doesn’t have built-in font cache cleaning, you can still clean your font caches with Font Finagler. Font Finagler is shareware, available at:
http://www.markdouma.com/fontfinagler/
Here are the steps for cleaning font caches with Font Finagler.
1. Launch Font Finagler.
NOTE: If you’re running Mac OS X 10.5 or later, an alert box appears over the application’s window reminding you that if you’ve deactivated fonts with FontBook (the built-in font manager in Mac OS X), cleaning the caches with FontFinagler reactivates those fonts. You can just click the OK button to make the alert box go away.
2. In the window, make sure that All font cache files is selected (that way you’ll clean all the font caches on your computer in one step). Then click the Inspect Font Cache Files button.
3. In a moment the window lists all the font cache files. Click the Clean Font Cache Files button.
4. You’ll see the window asking for your password. Enter the password and click the OK button.
5. You’ll see a warning that the machine must be restarted after cleaning the font cache files. Click the OK button. Your Mac will restart. Once it gets back to the desktop, launch your programs and make sure the fonts look correct.
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Photoshop Program Error when Selecting Type Tool
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
People have reported getting an error message when clicking on the Type tool in PhotoShop. The error message says, “Could not complete your request because of a program error.”
The Adobe installer for Photoshop or any Creative Suite installs a large number of Adobe Open Type fonts in /Library/Fonts. Because all those fonts are in one of the Mac OS X Fonts folders, they’re active all the time. People who use font management software like FontExplorer or Suitcase usually prefer to clear those fonts from the Mac OS X Fonts folder and import them into their font management program instead. That way they can activate those fonts when needed, and avoid having them clog the Fonts menu at other times.
Photoshop has certain required fonts without which the Type tool won’t work. Adobe knowledge base article 84363 deals with troubleshooting font issues in PhotoShop CS5, and it lists Photoshop’s required fonts. They are:
Required Fonts in Photoshop CS5
AdobeArabic-Bold.otf
AdobeArabic-BoldItalic.otf
AdobeArabic-Italic.otf
AdobeArabic-Regular.otf
AdobeHebrew-Bold.otf
AdobeHebrew-BoldItalic.otf
AdobeHebrew-Italic.otf
AdobeHebrew-Regular.otf
AdobeMingStd-Light.otf
AdobeMyungjoStd-Medium.otf
AdobeSongStd-Light.otf
KozGoPro-Regular.otf
KozGoPro-Bold.otf
KozGoPro-ExtraLight.otf
KozGoPro-Heavy.otf
KozGoPro-Light.otf
KozGoPro-Medium.otf
KozMinPro-Regular.otf
KozMinPro-Bold.otf
KozMinPro-ExtraLight.otf
KozMinPro-Heavy.otf
MyriadPro-BoldIt.otf
MyriadPro-Cond.otf
MyriadPro-CondIt.otf
MyriadPro-It.otf
MyriadPro-Semibold.otf
MyriadPro-SemiboldIt.otf
As long as those fonts are made active in your font management software or are in one of the Mac OS X Fonts folders, the Type tool should work.
Posted in Tech Notes, Troubleshooting Knowledge Base | 1 Comment »
Identify and Delete Viruses with ClamXav
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
While it’s true that Macs have been free of viruses, worms, trojans, and spyware, there is no guarantee that won’t change in the future.
We’ve seen a few Macs infected by phishing scripts. Phishing scripts run in the background, without your knowledge, sending out thousands of legitimate-looking email message that appear to come from banks, auction sites like eBay, payment processing companies like PayPal, social web sites, or IT or email administrators. Your address book provides the “mailing list” to the phishing script.
The goal of a phishing message is identify theft. The messages tries to fool the recipient into entering personal information like bank account numbers, credit card numbers, pin numbers, names, dates, and social security numbers at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one.
We haven’t seen a phishing script that does any damage to a Mac or its files, but an infected Mac may be noticeably slower than normal because it’s splitting its attention between the work that you’re doing and sending out the phishing messages.
Antivirus software will identify and delete phishing scripts. Our favorite is ClamXav, a free virus scanner for Mac OS X. It uses the very popular ClamAV open source antivirus engine as a back end and has the ability to detect both Windows and Mac threats.
Here are instructions for downloading, installing, and running ClamXav.
Download ClamXav at http://www.clamxav.com/download.php.
When the download is done, the following window should appear on your screen.
Drag the ClamXav icon from the window to the Applications folder on your hard disk. Then double-click the ClamXav icon in the Applications folder.
The first time you run ClamXav, an alert box tells you that you must first install the Clam Anti-Virus scanning engine. Click the Install button.
The Installer will launch, and you’ll see the following window. Click the Continue button.
Next is the “license” window. Click the Continue button.
Next is another window asking you to specifically agree to the license. Click the Agree button.
Next is a window for choosing the standard installation or changing the installation location. Simply click the Install button.
Launch ClamXav (by double-clicking its icon in the Applications folder). The main window appears. Click the Update Definitions button at the top of the window to be sure you have the very latest virus definitions.
You can also click on any of the other folders in the source list to run a virus check that’s limited to that folder. You can also drag additional folders or disks into the Source List to check them.
The virus scan will take a while…the bigger the folder or disk being scanned, and the more files within it, the longer it takes.
Any viruses, worms, trojans, and other malware files that are found will be listed in the upper pane of the ClamXav window. To get rid of them, click on one of them to highlight it, then click Select All in the Edit menu…which highlights the entire list. Finally, click the Delete File button at the top of the ClamXav window.
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Maintain Your Mac with Mac OS X Cocktail
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
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Repair Disk Permissions with Disk Utility
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
Apple’s Disk Utility is installed automatically with every Mac OS X installation. You’ll find it in this folder:
(your hard disk) > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility
While Disk Utility is most commonly used to initialize, format, and partition disks, it also verifies and repairs the integrity of disks and disk permissions.
When your Mac behaves strangely, Disk Utility can often help resolve the problem.
Disk permissions are used to control who can access each file and folder on your Mac. Some files and folders should only be accessible by Mac OS X itself, some to individual programs, some to the current user (you), and, if there are multiple user accounts on your Mac, some to each of the other user accounts. Other files should be accessible to everyone. Incorrect disk permissions, particularly on the startup disk, can cause strange behavior. Disk Utility can often resolve the problem.
1. Double-click the disk utility icon to open Disk Utility.
2. Click on the name of your startup disk in the column at the left side of the window. Then click the Repair Disk Permissions button. When the repair is complete quit Disk Utility…you’re done.
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Repair Your Hard Disk in Single User Mode
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
Mac OS X has a built-in disk diagnostic and repair program called fsck or file system consistency check. Unlike Disk Utility, which can only verify the current startup disk, fsck will verify and repair the current startup disk. Here’s how to verify and repair your startup disk with fsck.
1. Start or restart your Mac. As soon as you hear the startup tone, press and hold Command-S on the keyboard. Keep holding down those keys until you see a black screen with white lettering. This is called “booting into Single User Mode.” As soon as you see the black screen with white lettering, you can release the keys.
The single user mode screen
As the Mac boots in this mode, the screen reports each step of the process. Wait until the scrolling white text stops. The last line should end in root#.
2. Right after the root# prompt, enter the following:
/sbin/fsck -fy
Press the Return key.
You’ll see the prompts in the picture above as each part of the hard drive’s directory is checked. (Checking extents overflow file, Checking catalog file, Checking multi-linked files, etc.) It will take a few minutes. At the end, if your drive was OK, the screen will say “The volume (name of your hard drive) appears to be OK”. If any repair was made, you’ll see the prompt, “FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED”. Then, you’ll see the root# prompt again.
Right after the root# prompt, enter the following:
reboot
Press the Return key. Your Mac should restart normally.
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