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| Utility - Font Finagler | | Date Created: 05 Nov, 2004, 07:51 AM |
 As I have said in previous articles (most notably the article titled Why do my fonts look garbled? in the OS X Issues section of Font Geek) one of the most common font problems that you can have in OS X is corrupt font caches. Many people don't know if they are having this problem or not. If your text looks garbled or if you are having applications suddenly quit, you could be having font cache problems.
I have previously stated that DeepSix from If Then Software was my preferred utility for clearing font caches. But that has changed with the new release of Font Finagler 0.5.2. This is the newest offering from Mark Douma (who is also the author of dfontifier and Font Book Helper), and it has been completely re-written in Objective-C and C. The program has a lot of new features and it is well worth the $10 shareware fee that the author is asking. (Note: This utility used to be called Font Cache Cleaner.) |
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| If you're having font cache problems (like in the image above), it could be caused by corrupt font cache files. What appears to be happening is that incorrect or corrupted encoding vector information is being used when mapping the character codes as input by your keyboard to the glyphs they represent in the problematically cached font. |
You can use Font Finagler's Font Cache Cleaner feature to purge these cache files in an attempt to restore normal behavior, and to help rule out a font cache corruption as the sole cause of the problem.
For a step by step instruction on using Font Finagler, please refer to my "How to Use - Font Finagler" article also located in the Resources section of Font Geek. |
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Software Developer......................................Mark Douma
Current Version.............................................v. 0.5.2
Type of Software...........................................shareware: $10.00
System Requirements....................................OS 10.2 or higher
Type of Utility................................................font cache remover
Font Geek Rating...........................................4 out of 5 |
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Comparison: This utility is very much like DeepSix. I now prefer Font Finagler to DeepSix. Although it doesn't allow the user to set the utility to launch on start-up as well as dealing with some of Microsoft's problematic font preference files the way that DeepSix does, it does something that I consider more useful -- especially for larger companies. It allows for a non-administrative user to be given control to clear font caches (once) without being given administrative privileges to the entire computer (for subsequent uses of Font Finagler).
Additional Notes:
There is a very good "ReadMe.rtfd" document included with the software once it's downloaded. I strongly recommend that you read it prior to using the software.
You will find reviews/articles of dfontifier and Font Book Helper (both from Mark Douma) in the near future in the Resources section of Font Geek.
Coming Soon... We'll be posting an interview with Mark Douma where he'll be talking to us about dfontifer, Font Finagler, and other thoughts he has about fonts and the Mac OS. |
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