Archive for January, 2008

01.22.08

Font Problems in Office 2008

Posted in General at 4:11 pm by Nicholas

A while back I managed to get a Beta copy of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac. After installing it, I found that I was having a lot of font display problems, particularly on the web and in email: sometimes certain letters were missing; at other times, letters were present but overlapping to the point of being unreadable. I found a lot of other people having the same issue—turns out it happens to a lot of people who had a previous version of Office, because the installer updates the standard Microsoft fonts without cleaning up the old ones first.

What surprised me, however, is that the same problem still exists in the final version. What the hell was the beta for, if not to find and eliminate problems like this? Anyway, if you’ve recently installed Office 2008 and are having this problem, this should fix it:

  1. Open Font Book.
  2. Scroll through your fonts, looking for any fonts with a little black dot to the right of the name. Those are fonts with two different versions installed. Once you’ve found one, click the triangle to the left of the font name to expand the list.
  3. Click on one of the sub-entries and type Cmd-I to bring up the font info. You’ll note that there’s a new version and an old version. Right-click (or control-click) on the older one and select “Remove font.”
  4. Repeat the above for all duplicated fonts in the list.
  1. Reboot the computer.

01.17.08

150,000!

Posted in General at 7:30 am by Nicholas

My odometer at 150,000 miles.

Granted, only about 26,000 of those miles were driven by me, but still … onward to 200,000!

01.01.08

Shakespeare and Burbage

Posted in General at 9:41 pm by Nicholas

I picked up a copy of Shakespeare & Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story. I’d recommend it, but if the title doesn’t get your interest it might not be the book for you. Anyway, I like it a lot.

It contains quite a few amusing historical anecdotes. My favorite is a bit of gossip involving Richard Burbage, the most famous actor in Shakespeare’s troupe (The Lord Chamberlain’s Men), as related in the diary of John Manningham in 1602:

Upon a time, when Burbage played Richard III, there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage came. Then, message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.