Font Problem on Apple Mail

[maccebu]

Hi All,

I have an annoying problem on Apple Mail regarding fonts and I need a little help. This happens when creating new message.

I want to make some of my text on the body of the new message to be Bold and Italics however when I pressed cmd+b and cmd+i the font would sit in regular and would never change. It will however sometimes change when you go on to format menu on apple mail and select font bold but mostly does not.

thinking that I have a corrupt fonts I then run textedit and started testing there with the same font and format. It did make the text bold if i pressed cmd+b and italic if i pressed cmd+i

however in my mail it doesn't. It's kinda frustrating that I need to create the message on textedit and format the text i like and paste it on apple mail new message.

My new message is setup as RTF on mail preferences and I am using Helvetica and Arial.

Also in my mail the font and format are displaying correctly however when i send it to outlook or entourage users the fonts and formats are messed up. Hate it!

I am btw on Mac OS X 10.5.6 and Mail 3.6.

Has anyone experience this and can anyone recommend on how to solve my font issue.

[gierran]

Just tested Helvetica in my Mail, and it works fine when I create a rich text formal email. Have you tried a Repair and Rebuild Permissions in Disk Utility?

If you open the fonts window in Mail can you see the bold and italic versions? As I press cmd-b and cmd-I I can see the selection change in the fonts window. I'm pretty sure Mail uses the same font engine as textedit, so it seems like an unusual problem!

What do you mean, by "the fonts are messed up"?

[maccebu]

Just tested Helvetica in my Mail, and it works fine when I create a rich text formal email. Have you tried a Repair and Rebuild Permissions in Disk Utility?

yes, but still no dice!

If you open the fonts window in Mail can you see the bold and italic versions? As I press cmd-b and cmd-I I can see the selection change in the fonts window.

yup, the font that I am using has the ability to make text bold and italic and when I pressed cmd+i or cmb+b in the fonts window it switches to italic or bold but the fonts remain as regular text. Kinda unusual but very annoying.

I'm in need of finding a solution for this..

What do you mean, by "the fonts are messed up"?

messed up meaning windows outlook does not render the fonts I use (Arial). It defaults to Times New Roman on their side.

[maccebu]

has anybody experience this font issue on Apple Mail? I am avoiding of reinstalling the whole system as there are so many important applications. Also I tried logging in into a local admin account and used Apple Mail there and guess what the same font issues are happening.. grrr!

[gierran]

maccebu, if creating a new user account didn't help, then the easiest thing might be to do an archive and reinstall - you will still keep your apps and user settings and documents, but you might have to reinstall or reactivate a few programs. Personally, I send emails in plain text as much as possible! :P

You could try to replace the corrupt fonts. Did you ever install any additional fonts on your machine - maybe that is causing the problem?

• Go to your Applications folder and launch Font Book
• Select the one font you think is the problem, or sleet multiple fonts by holding down Command as you click on the suspects.
• Go under the File menu -> Validate Fonts. This would bring up the Font Validation window.
• If you get a little checkbox next to the font it’s good to go. If you get a yellow warning sign, there may be a problem, and if you get a red “x” then the font is corrupt.
• If corrupt, remove these by checking the boxes next to them and clicking Remove Checked at the bottom of the program window.

[hakka]

Wondering for what reason people are STILL using OFFLINE programs like bla-bla mail instead of WAY MORE ADVANCED ONLINE solutions - recent generation of Yahoo mail, Hotmail, Gmail is very capable doing pretty much everything you doing in apple mail or so.

Have a look, you'll never regret.

[maccebu]

@ gierran

Thanks for the info. I may try the fontbook and check the fonts I am using that could be a possible solution. I have notice in this machine that most of the fonts in '/Library/Fonts' were gone and I compared it to other macs and found out that fonts were missing in this unit I then copied all the fonts from the other machine and restarted the system and still Arial font does not work. I can see Arial.ttf, Arial Bold.ttf and Arial Italic.ttf and I believe these files are responsible for regular, bold and italic on the Arial Font. However making bold and italics on textedit using Arial Font does work.
In my 4 years of support in macintosh system I have never done any archive and install. How does archive and install works anyway does it touches only the OSX system or it includes archiving the user home folder then restore it after a new installation of the OS? Anyway thanks for your help


@ hakka

Let just say that I belong to a stone age company that wants only BASIC.

[maccebu]

just to update this thread. I have re-installed everything from scratch and now Apple Mail Fonts bold and italics works now. I found out later that it has to do with font particularly Arial and helvetica Neue running a font cleaner would easily solve this kind of issue.