Sunday, January 08, 2006

DVD Studio Pro cannot create buttons, apply templates, halts at "Loading Menus"

If you cannot create ANY buttons (yes, that's correct, no buttons can be created), DVD Studio Pro halts at "Loading Menus" when opening any project files, not can apply templates (Status bar halts when apply any templates).

The problem is exactly like the following posts:
http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=155&postid=559211&archive=T
http://www.wwug.com/cgi-bin/displaywwugpost.fcgi?forum=astarte_dvd&post=050427195617.htm

Guess what? All these problems are connected. It is a font conflict. I orginally removed all my fonts with FontBook that had a black dot to the right of it. It seemed to fix the problem--UNTIL I restarted OS-X. The problem was back again! I called Apple to see how to re-install the fonts. If this was Windows, I'd use the cab extractor (extract.exe) from the XP disk, but Apple doesn't have a package viewer app. Their Tech Support told me to do an archival re-install of OS-X. (Thanks a lot, Apple!!!) Kind of over-kill for just a few fonts, don't you think? So I re-installed my whole OS (well, the archival re-install) a few days ago. This meant re-downloading 150MB+ of updates I have previously downloaded via Software Update. (I'm sure they were probably in some temp folder, but being new to OS-X I wasn't sure where.)

The Solution

What I really and only needed to do was re-active the Helvetica.dfont file from FontBook. It is not located in the normal font folder, but in the System/Library/Fonts folder. Now DVD Studio Pro 4 works fine. Yes, it even creates buttons and actually opens files now!

Lesson learned: Software should not be dependent on fonts--even if it is a system font.


--Stephen M. James
www.smjdesign.com

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh this post was a lifesaver! I can't believe a program would rely on a single font to open a project. There should definitely be a replace option for another dfont. oh wel good fix!

December 14, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

oh, thank you... but little late for me :( I was faced that problem not so long ago and, guess what..., i had to rebuild whole project. It was nightmare. but anyway, thank you for posting this. it can defenetely save a lot of time, frozen project and "apple" from curses :D

Andrew

December 14, 2006  

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