I recently upgraded the entire Adobe Master Collection on my Macbook Pro to the CS4 versions and earlier today Photoshop started crashing. The horror. It happened whenever I tried to change the font on a piece of text. I was highlighting the text and using the arrow keys to flick through all the fonts in the list, one by one. Several ‘unexpected quits’ later, I’d narrowed it down to one particular font that was causing problems.
FontExplorer X also crashed when trying to view the offending font, but it appeared OK in Font Book.
There’s a couple of different ways to proceed if you’re faced with a similar problem. Obviously deleting the bad font (and re-installing if that’s an option) is one way to go. That assumes that the font file itself is bad.
But there’s also a chance that the font is OK, but the font cache is corrupted.
There are a couple of ways to clear your Mac’s font caches – one is to restart in Safe Mode (hold down the SHIFT key immediately after the startup sound and release after the Apple logo appears).
Fortunately, FontExplorer X has a couple of options under the Tools menu – ‘Clean System Font Caches’ and ‘Clean Application Font Caches’ (this gave me the option of cleaning the ‘Adobe’ application font caches). I cleaned both.
The end result? Photoshop CS4 working fine again.
A word of caution: there can be a number of reasons why fonts might go screwy on your Mac. Adobe has a page on troubleshooting font problems here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/327/327791.html . I’d suggest reading it before doing anything too drastic.