#FONTNUKE REVIEW MAC OS X#
There are various Mac OS X TeX implementations, and it was while I was glancing over some Web pages connected with these, reading about TeXShop and MacTeX, that I noticed a link to a page about the font cache bug. It’s often used for the production of scientific and mathematical books and papers. TeX (pronounced “tech”), for those who don’t know, is a typesetting program by the venerable Donald Knuth. But in what way are the fonts badly behaved, and what’s wrong with the font caching mechanism? The details come from an unexpected quarter of the Mac OS X world: the users of TeX. The problem seems to be caused, as one might expect, by a combination of two things: badly behaved fonts, and Apple’s font caching mechanism. Still, the question remains as to what actually triggers the bug. The occurrence of the font cache corruption bug on my machine has been less frequent in recent years indeed, I’m not certain I’ve ever seen it on Leopard (I was using TextMate on Tiger when the bug struck me).
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And, going back further in time, John Gruber had an extensive series of articles about it in 2005. Rob Griffiths mentions the bug in a recent Macworld article. A quick Google search turns up some pages that talk about it, including this one which provides some images of a corrupted Web page display, and a YouTube video showing characters randomly disappearing and reappearing (much like what I was experiencing myself). The bug can also mar the display of PDFs, I believe. The Mac OS X font cache bug is an intermittent misbehavior of fonts on Mac OS X, typically affecting any application that displays Web pages with the built-in WebKit engine (Safari, OmniWeb, TextMate, BBEdit, and CSSEdit are examples). Indeed, I had referred to it implicitly, years before, in my review of Smasher (see “ Insider Smashes Suitcases,” ). I’d forgotten all about it, and I certainly had not connected it with TextMate’s output.
Either of these problem could have been corrected by a reboot.” Oh, yes, the font cache bug. Another possibility is that your font caches had become corrupted. I posted a query to the TextMate users newsgroup, and someone responded: “WebKit is used to render the HTML output window, and it has been known to behave strangely from time to time. But I was left wondering what the heck had just happened. There was nothing really wrong with the script itself, but TextMate appeared to have lost its mind instead of showing me the actual string resulting from the script, like “ogopogo,” it was omitting some of the letters, like “gpg.” I restarted the computer and everything was fine after that. The other day I was using TextMate to run a simple Ruby script and an odd thing happened: the script suddenly started producing nonsense.
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