For some time now my MS Word application was acting up, crashing regularly and working very slowly. I got tired of thinking that it was “normal” behavior for a Microsoft (MS) application and started looking for solutions. It turns out I was being unfair to MS this time, the problem lied on the Font Validation application that comes with Mac OS X.
When you install applications that brings fonts to the Mac OS X environment they get automatically organized in the Font Book.app. The Font Book.app is located in the Application folder of Mac OS X by default, go and launch it and I will give you some tips to make it healthy again.
Before we do that let me explain a bit about what was the problem, if you MS Word application crashes after you try to Save, run Spell Check, or change the fonts you are using then this is the solution. Keep in mind that this worked for me but if your problems persist then it may be something else, trying this however will not render your MS application unserviceable.
Open the application and simply go the collection column of the application and hit “All Fonts”. Go to the next column, the one with the label “Font” and select all fonts, you can do this by selecting one font and then clicking “command+a” (that’s letter “A”) to select all. Finally, go to the menu bar at the top of your screen and click “File”, then “Validate Fonts” option.
Automatically the application will check all fonts in your computer, if you have any serious problems, those are marked in red, get rid of those fonts immediately. For those marked in yellow, you have conflicting fonts, most of the time this means that they are duplicated.
To check for duplications, click on the little triangle by the name of the font with a yellow mark, until you see a list of the checks the system did. At the bottom is the option that will tell you if the font is duplicated or not, if it is then delete the font.
To make this even faster, in the upper-left corner of the Font Book.app there is an option to see only warnings, by default it shows the option “All”, change it to “Warnings”. Then click on Select all fonts next to the font list and finally at the bottom-right of the application you have a Removed Checked option, click on it and your problems are gone.
Confirm the selection and recheck all fonts to make sure you didn’t miss anything, and restart your machine. Make sure you repair your permissions, if you don’t know what this is check this link. Your MS Word application should behave normally without crashing all the time, if it still do, at least you know is not a fonts problem.
Make sure you leave all your questions or comments on this article comments section, if you think I made a mistake feel free to mention it here and I will correct whatever it is. Thanks for stopping by and remember to follow me on twitter or Facebook if you will. If you liked this article support my site by doing your Amazon shopping using this link.
