Fonts and computers. What a waste of my morning. Some days are like that. I was planning on spending my morning sitting down, relaxing, and reading. That sounded like a good idea to me. It was February first. The day of the big snow storm. So it wan’t like I was running out to do anything that morning.
I usually get up just after 6AM. I get in the shower, eat breakfast, write my comic strips, and get dressed all before 7AM. Then I usually sit down, read, surf the web, play a short video game, or maybe get a few things done that need to be done before I start working at 8AM. I’d like to say I get to spend that hour relaxing and reading but often I have to spend half of it performing some menial task.
That morning I had planned to relax and read a pile of comics I had. After I buy my new comics for the week I read them twice before filing them away. Once within a couple of days of buying them and then for a second time a week or so later. This was my second read through. Or it was supposed to be.
Before I eat my bowl of cereal for breakfast in the morning I get out my laptop, put it on my drawing table, and write one of my comic strips as I stand there. I’m not always standing still as I get dressed and go through my morning routine as I write. This usually takes about 15 minutes and then I get my morning bowl of cereal.
I used to eat Cheerios or Wheaties for breakfast. But now I haven’t had any Wheaties in about a decade. They changed the recipe for them an I no longer like them. After that I started mixing my cereals. Right now my current mixture is about half Cheerios, a third Rice Chex, and a small bit of Lucky Charms on top. Sometimes I swap out the Lucky Charms for some other sugary cereal like Apple Jacks.
As with writing my comic strip I eat my cereal standing at my drawing table with my computer in front of me. This is when I read my morning comic strips. I have a couple of them bookmarked and a bunch more in my RSS reader. I also have some blogs in my RSS feed so I check them all out as I eat breakfast. This usually takes me until 7AM or slightly after.
The snow was falling outside my window as I ate breakfast this morning and I knew it was going to be a bear to clean it all up. But it was supposed to snow all day and into the night so I couldn’t do anything about the clean up then. Instead I was looking forward to sitting for a while and reading. I knew I would need some relaxation because that snow cleanup was going to take a lot out of me.
That’s when I ran into a computer problem. I often run into computer problems in the morning because that’s when I turn the machines on. I wake up, turn on my desktop computer, and then hit the shower. Occasionally after I get out of the shower my computer hasn’t turned on correctly and then I have to figure out why. This time it was my laptop.
Though I turn off my desktop computer every night I usually just close the laptop. This put it to sleep but doesn’t really turn it off. It’s quicker and more convenient that way. So every morning I put my laptop on my drawing table, open it up, put in my password, and I’m ready to go. Except the mornings when things go wrong.
That morning I happened to have written my comic strip the night before. I do that on occasion. So after dressing and such I got right to reading my RSS feed and eating breakfast. After that I decided to glance over at the comic strip I had written.
I use two fonts in my webcomic. One is a custom font a friend made, that’s for the words in the word balloons, and the other is the font at the bottom of the strip that has my name and the title of the strip. As I switched over to Adobe Illustrator, which is what I do my comic strip in, the program told me that my fonts were missing. This is unusual since they’re always there.
I opened up the program that manages fonts, Font Book, to see if the fonts somehow got turned off and if I could turn them on again. Font Book didn’t even acknowledge that the fonts existed. I found the original font files on my laptop and tried to put them into Font Book again. Font Book didn’t even acknowledge that the fonts existed. This was getting annoying so a restart was called for.
I restarted my laptop because that often fixes any problems I might have. This time it didn’t. I did all the same stuff again with all the same results. My fonts wouldn’t activate. I decided to restart again but this time with a Safe Boot. Safe Boot is when you hold down the Shift key as you restart and it fixes even more stuff. Then you restart again regular. This also did nothing.
I tried running Disk Utility. This is a program that fixes things on your Mac. It did nothing. After that I figured maybe the fonts got corrupted somehow. I had a copy of the fonts on my desktop computer so I copied them over to my laptop. Font Book wouldn’t read those either. I was at my wit’s end.
With nothing left to try I performed another Safe Boot and restarted the laptop. Guess what? After that everything went back to normal. My fonts were there, fine, and would open. I have no idea why. I worked for 45 minutes trying to get the laptop and fonts to run correctly. I have no idea why it wasn’t working and no idea how it got to working correctly again. I do know that it ruined my plan to sit down and read for the morning. Oh well, computers can be crazy.