Welcome to the reason why I've been so anti-social since coming back from Montreal. Maybe not the actual reason—maybe I'll feel like posting about that later—but this is part of the result. I've been geeking out hardcore. Lots to report on in that area, but there is one big issue I'm facing today. It's driving me crazy, and it'll have a profound on the use of my favourite font for anyone else who uses it. This is HUGE EARTH SHATTERING NEWS. Honestly the sad thing is I really feel that way this morning.

I installed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard last Friday, just as a test. I repartitioned my active drive using Boot Camp, threw in the Leopard disk, reformatted the DOS partition and installed on that. Perfect. I maintained my Tiger installation (which I actually never ended up reusing—Leopard is cool). There's a lot that has been said about Leopard. Definitely a worthwhile upgrade in some ways. The things that stand out the most for me are the snappier network mounting (since it doesn't tie up your machine when connecting to a new share), and... well that's a big deal. I've heard a lot about the revised Font Book application. With auto font activation, it sounded like it might actually be a proper replacement for the font management software I've been using.

Don't get me started on font management software. It's such a heated topic (surprisingly and sadly). I've been much happier since switching to Linotype FontExplorer X, but system-level activation sounds so much better. In practice... not work so goodness. Font Book took all my Opentype fonts no problem, and it seemed to auto activate and deactivate well. Awesome. I started throwing in the rest of my fonts. I started with letters A through C. It choked halfway through C after three hours. Not cool.

I got rid of everything that I had put into Font Book, cleared my cache (which incidentally is much easier to clear on Leopard—it's just one terminal command), restarted, then put FontExplorer and some fonts back in. Every time I rebooted after that it told me there was a conflict with Helvetica Neue 2, and to remove it. OS X has shipped with Helvetica Neue for... I dunno, a while. It's my favourite font. I dig helvetica, but this version is cleaner, and just slightly styled... I can't put a finger on what it is that makes it different... I think the weights are supposed to be more consistent or something. The light versions are especially pretty. But whatever... it's there, and it's a default system font. I would applaud them for it... I really would... but...

My version of Helvetica Neue includes all the weights, and it happens to be a Postscript version, but it conflicted with the Apple installed version of Helvetica Neue. So when it told me to remove MY Helvetica Neue, I took out the Apple one instead. But as soon as I removed it the system told me that it was a protected font, and it restored it. Every time I deleted it. Not cool. So I found the cache that it restored the font from and deleted that too. I rebooted and everything seemed to be okay... except iPhoto. iPhoto requires HelveticaNeue.dfont (the Apple version), and for some reason even though I installed my whole Postscript version in the /System/Library/Fonts folder (where the Apple one was), it wouldn't replace it. I see... it's smart enough to know there's a conflict, but not smart enough to replace their version with mine! Ridiculous.

So now I'm screwed. I either have to figure out a way to resolve the conflict (maybe changing font IDs?) so both can remain active, or I have to separate my Postscript Helvetica Neue files and only open the ones that don't conflict with the TrueType versions. That's not ideal... I hate mixing Postscript and Truetype—it's just asking for trouble.

Now if I'm having so much trouble with this, what does that mean for anyone else who wants to use it? And what does that mean for the future of my favourite font? I might have to replace everything with the new Opentype versions instead. I guess from now on my favourite font is Helvetica Neue LT Pro. Doesn't have as nice of a ring really.