Reinstalling OSX10.4 and Indesign looses MathType fonts

Question

I have been using MathType to create formulas.  First I copy from MathType into Illustrator, then proceed to copy from illustrator and paste into Indesign.  This procedure has worked well, until I needed to reinstall my OS system.  After reinstalling OS10.4, my Indesign docs have replaced some fonts with boxes.  I have reinstalled CS3 and MathType 6.0 with no solution to this problem.  I still get boxes for certain fonts (like MT extra).  I do not know how to fix this, any light on this problem would be greatly appreciated.  I have several hundred pages of documents that have been affected in this bad way.

Answer 1

Yes, you just drag them where you want them. But from your described work path, you actually want the fonts to be available in MathType, in Illustrator, AND in Indesign, so I wouldn't put them in the Indesign folder -- that makes them only available to Indesign. MathType is a real bear for fonts, because it's version of Symbol and Adobe's version of Symbol don't get along, which has been a pain-in-the-tush for me. I suspect the root cause is that MathType mostly is interested in working smoothly with Microsoft Word, and Indesign is a lesser concern, and you know Microsoft is going to use their own proprietary version of the Symbol font. (The problem characters are the large "fences" for putting brackets and parens around equations, and some unusual Greek characters like the upside-down capital Delta. These often show up onscreen but don't print.)
What I would do is after you reinstall OSX 10.4, reinstall the MathType fonts, particularly Symbol and MT Extra. Be aware that the CS4 applications keep their own version of Symbol that they rely on hidden in an Adobe folder, and I've found that it you remove it and replace it with the MathType one, horrible things can happen.
For a font manager, I use FontExplorer from Linotype, which is a freebie and works very well. It doesn't "auto-activate" fonts in CS4, but you do get a list of missing fonts when you open a document, and you can toggle over to Font Explorer and open them. If you've created font groups by project, you can turn them on with one click. When you return to your CS4 app, it'll work.
FontExplorer also has several nice utilities -- one that strips the System folder of all fonts not installed by OSX, so you can move spurious fonts from Microsoft and various other programs to Font Explorer's folders, which makes it easy to turn them off when you don't want them, and keep your font menus from being three miles long. And another utility that deletes font "caches" in applications, which you'll want to do after you've messed about with the various forms of Symbol and MT Extra, so that your CS4 applications don't remember a version of the font that's no longer there.