The most recent security updates to MacOS seems to be breaking font rendering quite severely.
Among the observed symptoms are:
- Broken kerning - kerning tables on many fonts not used at all
- Broken ligatures - ligatures ignored completely
- Broken glyphs - gibberish vectors jutting out
The fonts still show up fine when used in Adobe's own tools, but the same text with the same font in other applications may look completely distorted.
The complaints go on and on in different forums and discussions about the problem, which apparently stems from some security-related fixes that was made to address potential code execution exploits and vulnerabilities in the opentype font handling of malformed fonts. Much of the discussion has really lousy solutions such as converting perfectly good fonts to other formats and stripping out advanced features in the process "to make them work". Hardly acceptable!
In my work I use custom fonts that I have made myself with special ligatures for product marking. Since the OS update none of my custom fonts are working correctly on Mac, but they still work fine on Windows. I'm very frustrated over this and Apple is completely non-responsive on the subject.
I'd like to hear if anybody here is looking at this problem. It would be useful to understand specifically how opentype fonts are now being treated on Mac - whether these font features are indeed shut off, or whether only specific conditions causes the problem to affect certain fonts. My observation in any case is that this seems to strike across the board - institutional, licensed type sets and hand-me-down freebie custom doodad fonts alike.
I am a long-time user of FontLab but this is my first-time post here in this forum, so I hope I don't break any rules with this post.
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