[Hidden-tech] Missing TimesNewRomanPSMT

[Todd Howard]

Hello Hidden-Tech Listers,

Sorry in advance for the long email! This is a real mystery, and googling the issue turned up some instances of it, but no resolutions... just a lot of old dead forum threads...

The BACKSTORY: I am a lifelong Mac user and I'm running Mac OS X 10.6.5 currently. Everything's updated, gobs of RAM and CPU speed; 2 year old Mac Pro 8 core. I'm normally the person that people with Mac questions come to for answers.... this one is stumping the hell out of me, and it is in that state that I turn to you all.

I'm using Pages (iWork '09) as a stand in for MS Word. I'm working on the third edition of my book, and my publisher *requires* MS Word.

Since the first edition, 2008, I have been using Pages instead of MS Word, and the publisher/editors have never known the difference. I opened their word doc templates with all of their required manuscript styles, and built my original 12 chapter book from these MS files, with Pages. Everything has always worked perfectly.

End of the day, I export as "Word" and my editor receives manuscript .docs, and has been for years, no problem. She initiates the track changes function, and sends me her edits, and I can open them all back up in Pages again, and it works seamlessly, track changes and all. I make my edits, send them page as a Word .doc file... all is well with the world.

The PROBLEM: Yesterday, I'm sitting here writing... (10th day or so in a sting of days working on revisions to the book, using the last final docs) I did nothing, didn't update the OS, didn't add anything strange or new to the computer... I performed a standard Export -> Word Doc, and suddenly, my page view goes all wonky. The letters in the text of my document spaz out, develop a strange case of kerning and line separation, and it looks like there's a space between every letter. I even begin to suspect that the font has changed, although, the Font menu still reads Times New Roman...

From that moment on, every pages file form my book that I open in Pages says:

Some warnings occurred. Would you like to review them now.

I click Review, and it says:

Warning Type:
Substituted Font

Warning:
The font “TimesNewRomanMS” was substituted for the missing font “TimesNewRomanPSMT.”


I don't think I ever had a font called TimesNewRomanPSMT to begin with, but regardless... when I select a paragraph of regularly styled Times New Roman 10, Regular (the normal body style for the book), I look to the font menus, and the font menu still says Times New Roman, but the style menu which normally says "Regular" for this particular style, is now blank... and I can select "Regular" from that menu, but nothing happens...

in fact If I select all on the whole document and change to a different font all together, the font changes, but then I can't change BACK to Time New Roman...

Does any one have a clue what might be going on here? Everything was working fine and has been for months. I didn't do anything new or different. It seems to me that my Font has just corrupted somehow... but...

Some Troubleshooting Steps I took:

- I ran Font Book's font validation feature, and it validated my Times New Roman font, says everything is fine with it. I also did a search, Mac users know there are two main Fonts directories, one for the "whole computer" and one within the home directory of each "user account." I searched both directories... the main hard drive fonts library contains:
Times New Roman Bold Italic.ttf
Times New Roman Bold.ttf
Times New Roman Italic.ttf
Times New Roman.ttf

and the user/library/fonts directory contains no Times fonts whatsoever.

- Also, uploaded one of the files to my editor, and she was able to open them in MS Word and they looked 100% normal and fine, with no errors on her end.

Again, sorry for such a diatribe, but I wanted to lay it all out in hopes of finding some suggestions, solutions or resolutions.

Thank you all sincerely,
Todd Howard

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