Granted, there is something wrong on my computer. It seems to only be a problem in Entourage.
I do in fact have Times New Roman installed, in ~/Library/Fonts. Plain ol' Times is installed in [HD]/System/Library/Fonts.
There is no variant of Times in my OS9 fonts folder.
I've culled all my font folders to near-minimum configuration, as well as I can find such documented, plus a very few completely standard fonts I use regularly. Unfortunately, this configuration has suffered a bit from the habit of installers to unexpectedly install new fonts, but each font folder is still relatively clean in terms of numbers and keeping to standard fonts. In other words, I'm pretty conservative about fonts.
As far as not removing Microsoft fonts from my home font folder, I can't accept a bunch of fonts that I'll never use and which simply bloat my font menus, some of which get very balky when overloaded. If there is a small set of minimum Office-required fonts -- don't see why, but OK, if this is documented, I guess I'll make sure they are installed. I haven't seen any such list. No Office application has said at startup, "Sorry, you don't have <font name> installed, so I can't run..."
In any case, Entourage was working just fine until recently with respect to fonts, and the only visible changes to my font folders are have been some minor additions of optional fonts.
Checking further, all the Entourage settings in Preferences--> General Preferences --> Fonts were set to Times, not TNR. I think that's a consistent setting -- after all, Times is installed.
To get a fresh start, I set all the Entourage font choices to "Helvetica", which is in [HD]/System/Library/Fonts, verified there's no variant of Helvetica in the Classic font folder, rechecked that Font Book doesn't show the dreaded duplicate-marker for Helvetica --no bullet appears for Helvetica-- quit, then restarted Entourage.
When I open a new message in plain text mode and type 'L' followed by '/', I see "L/" (in Helvetica). So far so good. When I type 'l' (lower case ell) followed by '/', I see "L/". Yes, that's right, lower-case ell slash maps to upper-case ell slash. Same is true with HTML mode enabled.
Now, I've switched to Helvetica.
Following this sentence I'll type capital ell followed by a slash: L/
Following this sentence I'll type lower-case ell followed by a slash: l/
Hmm, that worked right. On the next line I'll type lower-case ell followed by a slash:
L/
That would not be right. I'll do it again on the following line:
L/
A quick check in TextEdit shows correct operation with Helvetica. I could believe that I might have a corrupt font, but not two of them. Other ideas?
The simple answer is that you've brought these troubles on yourself by messing with the fonts. I'm not surprised to hear it. Yes, you're supposed to be able to do so, but why bother? Why not just leave everything alone? people who leave their fonts alone have no problems. For goodness, do you really need the disk space in this day and age? Your "near-minimum" configuration is evidently "below-minimum" configuration. OK, it's got nothing to do with OS 9. Fine. I've noticed that the versions of fonts installed by Office 2004 in the ~/Library/Fonts folder are usually a lot newer than the (Apple plus god-knows-where derived) fonts in /Library/Fonts. Not to mention that several of the MS Fonts - including TNR - are Unicode fonts where the versions of the same fonts in /Library/Fonts are not. And that Entourage is an MS Office app which expects the MS Office-installed versions.
Do this: remove all fonts (or all MS fonts) from both ~/Library/Fonts and /Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office/Fonts. Quit all Office apps. Launch Word and Entourage. Now try.
--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>
PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using - **2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions otherwise.
