Why do words suddenly disappear…
Chris and I have been busy packing for our upcoming move to the Virginia coast, so I haven’t really had the time to think about my website. I keep interrupting myself to do other things, like organize my shoes and stuff yarn skeins into boxes—anything to get through the process. My computer appears to be experiencing its own setbacks, too, with this happening every so often:
Letters disappear, randomly, from dialog boxes and menus. I’ve always considered it a glitch with the system font, but last time even the text inside Firefox started disappearing. Has this happened to anybody else? Ever? When it happens to me, I “repair permissions” on my Mac through the Disk Utility. I think of it like “defragging” on a Windows machine, even though they’re dissimilar in the way that repairing permissions takes a couple minutes and defragging takes, like, two days. Anyway, when my letters disappear, I repair permissions and then I restart my laptop. I only have OS 10.3.9 so maybe that’s where the issue is centralized, but I’m not upgrading until I get a new computer. I don’t upgrade well: I still have a second-era iPod that’s heavy as a brick.
So naturally, I’m very nervous about moving.
Being that you’re a designer and all, I’m wondering if you may have overwritten your system fonts with some baddies.
I once overwrote all my system fonts (Arial, Georgia, Helvetica, Times New Roman, etc.) with some corrupt copies I’d accidentally copied from a friend’s machine. The results were quite similar to what you’re seeing.
If you’ve still got the install disc for 10.3, try popping it in the disc drive and look for an “Extras” folder or somesuch. I forget if that’s just an Adobe convention or not, but I think there’s a way to nab file level stuff like this from a central place on the disc.
Oh, wait – yeah, permissions. My note above still applies, but if you’re overwriting the system fonts, it could be that the permissions on the new versions that are breaking stuff, and not the fonts being corrupt themselves.
Yeah, I’m not really sure anymore. I certainly do a lot with fonts, and I had the same kinda prob with my old PC. This laptop’s been through a lot, too.
I once installed a security update that prevented Safari and Mail from launching at all, and it totally bugged me because that’s a default Apple update, you know? So I went to the Apple discussion board and somebody said, “Did you repair permissions first? You should always do that first,” and I was like, “Uh, what? Shouldn’t the updater do that itself, then?” So that’s where the permission repairing started for me.
Anyway, I figured out the issue and helped some other people, so that was cool.