Expert: Amy - 7/29/2005

Question
Hi there

I am running Adobe Illustrator 10 on Mac OS10.2.8 with Suitcase X1. It seems that when I open an Illustrator file the fonts display incorrectly, with letters all on top of each other. The fonts seem to be loaded properly and when I change each type object to another font and back, all looks good.

I wonder if you know how I might solve this tedious problem so the docs display correctly upon opening?

Cheers! Zak

Answer
Hi Zak,

I think there was talk of a conflict between some versions of Suitcase and AI10 but I'm not 100% sure of the versions involved.... soooooo... let's assume you have a fontlist error. To fix this,

Disable all the fonts in Suitcase.

Quit illustrator and search for all the adobefnt.lst files and delete them. They have names like: adobefnt01.lst, Adobefnt05.lst and Adobefnt06.lst.

After you delete those files, re-enable Suitcase and restart Illustrator. Those files you deleted get recreated, by the way.

Did that work?

If not, other possibilities exist, including corrupt fonts. I believe Suitcase has the function of being able to detect corrupt/duplicate fonts? I'd Look into that and see if you can find any bad ones and get rid of them.

After you do that, I'd delete the fontlist files again before restarting Illustrator.

If Suitcase can't do this, you have to go through them all "manually." First turn all fonts off, then use suitcase to turn them on in small groups. Start Illustrator after each group of fonts is activated until you recreate the problem. Then you can narrow down the culprit and get rid of it.

Please try these two things and let me know your results, okay?

-Amy