Unable to open QuarkXPress files

[Ferkner]

Thank you very much, Mat!

This is a big help for me to understand how all this works. I will strip down the OS to just the system fonts and then use ATM so that I can use the OTF fonts as well as the Mac fonts that were on the backup discs that work in Suitcase.

Indeed the way fonts work in Mac OS is very confusing to me, but this information will help a lot. Hopefully the OTF fonts I have for what I was missing will work properly. If I have any problems of questions of course I will post back here. I'll do so for any success too

[Mat]

You are welcome!
Contrary to you I love the way Mac OS 9 works and a lot ot things are a lot more logical than in other Operating Systems! So I hope we can show you that in the end everything is quite easy and stringent.
Perhaps you should start to try to activate one single font via System Folder and see if it works. Than if you got it, try to use ATM Deluxe, and activate one other single font that is OTF or a Mac PostScript font. You will soon get a feeling how things work.

And yes, please tell us how everything is going on.

[Ferkner]

I haven't tackled this yet. I've been concentrating on other things at the moment (including going through the one issue I have on CD and pulling all the digital assets off of it) while kind of putting off tackling this because I want to make sure I have a large chunk of time I could set aside to do this instead of working sporadically. Hopefully I make myself do it this weekend

My first task will be to go through all the fonts I have on disc and place them in a folder on the iMac so I can work from that and get rid of any duplicates that exist on multiple discs. One is a DVD-R so I don't know how I will get to that info on the iMac.

After that I want to go through all the font collections I downloaded from Macintosh Garden and put them in the same folder so that I can track what I have and what I don't need. If I have them all in one place (and only one copy) then it should be far easier to manage compared to what I've been doing.

Then I will test activating one font in the System folder. I'll open one of the Quark files without any added fonts active, pick one of the missing ones, add it to the System Folder and reopen and see if it's no longer missing. Then I'll remove that font and try it with ATM. If that works then I will try to keep them all in ATM, and I will try an OTF font as well.

I currently have Suitcase for this, but it sounds like ATM is the better choice so I'll go with that and disable Suitcase.

[macarone]

>very few programs have own or additional "font-systems

Due to the Covid pandemic, I'm still away from my OS 9 computer, and am just going by memory, so can't actually test this myself right now, BUT:

The original method for adding fonts to the system was "Font/DA Mover". Even though no longer needed, I believe it continued to work in OS 9. I also recall that there was a little trick whereby if you held down the Option Key before selecting a destination, you could actually embed a specific font in a specific Application.

I was able to embed music notation fonts like Sonata, in music notation Applications, and remove them from the System, so that they didn't appear in word processing or page layout programs.

Using this method, it was also possible to add a special font that was embedded in an application. Some games had special fonts, and using this method it was possible to copy the font that only appeared in the game to the System, so you could also use it in a page layout application like QuarkXPress.

[Ferkner]

So I finally got around to tackling this project. I went through a good chunk of the font repositories I downloaded and through them all in their own folder (not the system folder). Before turning on ATM I opened all the Quark files I have and made a note of which fonts it said were missing. I found those fonts and put them in a different folder just so that they would be separate from the thousands of others. I added those fonts to ATM and turned it on and then opened a handful of pages in Quark.

Overall it was a big success. Of the pages I opened, Quark said only a few fonts were still missing. When I checked ATM, it said three were broken; if I remember correctly they were all TrueType fonts. Two other fonts were marked as missing by Quark, but I was able to replace them in the dialog box Quark pops up with OpenType versions.

When I opened the exported EPS files on my Windows PC in Illustrator, that program said fonts were missing as well because I don't have the same fonts on both machines. These were easy to find and install, thus so far it's been a decently smooth workflow. the main issue now apart from missing art assets is that the kerning on some pages is completely messed up. On some pages lines of text will be their own layer, parts of sentences will be their own layer, words will be their own layer, and some words will be multiple layers. Of the four I played with there was only one where I had to do extensive fixing by basically retyping everything.

But the end result is pretty nice.