It seems that the Office 2008 installer leaves several copies of their fonts in /Library/Fonts/
The older versions are named such as “Courier New” while the newer versions are named “Courier New.ttf”
Sadly, Font Book as disabled the new fonts and offers to delete them over the old fonts. Yuck.
I am not sure what caused this, but I am guessing it is due to the migration of Tiger to Leopard, copying the old MS fonts, but since i had never reinstalled Office, the office 2008 installer found nothing to uninstall, including the older fonts. Sigh.
I cleaned this up very simply:
- Use Font Book to look for duplicates
- Scroll through your font list and look for a black dot next to a font name
- Turn down the disclosure triangle for the font
- Select a font and press CMD-I to show the info pane
- Select two of the same faces (say bold) and compare. One of the info fields is location, look for the font name with .ttf and delete the other (So if you have Andale bold and Andale bold, select each bold, compare versions and names, then delete the non .ttf file)
- You can easily remove a font by right clicking the font and choosing remove font.
You’ll find you have something like:
- Andale ** bold ** bold ** italic ** italic
etc. Once you delete the non-ttf file, all duplicates for Andale will disappear.
Move on to the next black dotted duplicate font.