Fixing problems while
using Snow Leopard
I received more e-mails about Snow Leopard issues than just about anything else these days, with the exception of PDF problems. I’ve been following my e-mails lately and average about three cries for help each day related to Snow Leopard. For those unfamiliar with Snow Leopard, it is the latest Mac operating system. While consulting with newspapers far and wide over the past few months, problems with printers, PDF files and fonts since installing the new operating system are common. As I mentioned in previous write-up, I’ve found a fix for the disappearing Adobe PDF driver issue. Since that column was released, I’ve been flooded with e-mails asking for my findings. It was tempting to keep this discovery to myself, meaning newspapers and others would have to hire me to learn my little secret. Conscience, however, got the best of me. So I’ll share my secrets with you.
Adding an Adobe PDF Printer Driver in Snow Leopard! While visiting with newspapers over the past couple of months, I’ve actually come across a couple of ways to tackle this issue. One morning, I installed Snow Leopard (10.6.4) on my iMac. Let me explain the method I used to fix this problem.
Step 1: Find the Adobe PDF printer driver on a backup drive or another computer in your workplace. I was able to find mine on several backup drives. If you had an Adobe PDF printer driver on your computer before installing Snow Leopard, you should be able to find it on a backup. It is located in the Mac HD>Library>Printers>PPDs>Content>Resources>enlproj folder. Whew.
Step 2: Copy that file to the Mac HD>Library>Printers>PPDs>Content>Resources folder on your new system. You can skip the enlproj folder from the previous step. Simply put the file in the Resources folder.
Kevin Slimp
|
Step 3: Go to your System Preferences (found under the apple in the top corner of your desktop). Then click on ‘Print & Fax’.
Step 4: Click on the + (plus) button at the bottom of the list of printers in the Print & Fax window.
Step 5: Follow along with the screenshot that (I hope) is found on this page. Set your Protocol to ‘Line Printer Daemon’. Select any IP address that pops up in the Address line. Enter a name for the driver. I used ‘Adobe PDF’. You can leave the Location line blank. Finally, click on the ‘Print Using’ line and select ‘Other’.
Step 6: Find the printer driver that you previously copied to the Resources folder earlier. If you receive the prompt, ‘A queue for this printer already exists’, click ‘Continue’.
Step 7: Click on the ‘Add’ button. You have successfully fixed the problem.
The next time you select ‘Print’ in InDesign (or other programmes), you should see a printer named ‘Adobe PDF’ or whatever you named the printer during the installation.
Type 1 fonts disappearing in Snow Leopard! Lisa Griffin, my good friend who serves as the technical guru for the Boone Group of newspapers based in Alabama, called while I was working on the printer driver issue and asked if I’d run into a lot of papers losing fonts when upgrading to Snow Leopard. The answer was “yes,” but I hadn’t spent much time trying to figure out why this was happening.
It’s good to have friends. Lisa told me she’d been working on this for some time and had noticed that some Type 1 fonts worked fine in OS 10.6, but many didn’t. After much trial and error, she found that if you copy your Type 1 fonts to the folder associated with a particular application, they usually work fine from then on.
For instance, if a particular font that is installed in the Fonts folder inside your Library folder isn’t showing up in InDesign, copy that font to the Applications>InDesign>Fonts folder. That should do the trick.
I wish I’d known this few days ago. I was pulling my hair out while at a small newspaper that had recently purchased a couple of new computers. They were unable to get their fonts to match because some of the fonts on the old computers wouldn’t show up on the new ones. Hopefully, I’ll remember to send them this column.
You might wonder why Apple chose to make changes to their latest operating system that causes these quirks to exist. I have no idea. Officially, from what I’ve read, Apple does not support Type 1 fonts any longer. They seem to work fine if you follow the previous suggestion, but still they are not officially supported.
And, don’t even get me started on the PDF printer driver debate. I’m still a little hot from my previous experience. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, visit my website (kevinslimp.com) to see how that turned out. And PC users, I apologize. This column probably didn’t interest you at all. However, it might have given you something to use when arguing with your Mac friends.
(Kevin Slimp is director of the Institute of Newspaper Technology and technology guru. Read past columns at www.kevinslimp.com. Newspapers can sign up to spend an hour with Kevin during live webinars at www.braincast.biz)
