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benign · Feb 29, 2004, 05:37 PM

What's your favorite system font replacement ?

I like this font but it's nowhere near perfect...

Trying Unsanity's silk - after many font disasters
I would like to know, if you use silk what font/s works for you.

HytestA · Feb 29, 2004, 08:35 PM

Presently using DINNeuzeitGrotesk Regular (Adobe), but i have on occasion used Bottix (Blamfonts).
I find most fonts dont work due to being too extended or not sitting in the correct place, either too high or too low all of these causing text to go missing in dialogue boxes.
maybe its just my fonts :/

neo_2510 · Feb 29, 2004, 08:53 PM

Originally posted by HytestA:
Presently using DINNeuzeitGrotesk Regular (Adobe), but i have on occasion used Bottix (Blamfonts).
I find most fonts dont work due to being too extended or not sitting in the correct place, either too high or too low all of these causing text to go missing in dialogue boxes.
maybe its just my fonts :/

No, I tried a view font I like a lot, but none of them looked okay. Somewhere okay in one app and look crappy in another one. So I turned that Haxie off. Don't know why I spend money for that, anyway...

Maybe someone is using a cool font that works okay everywhere. I don't want something fancy just something which is a bit smaller than Lucida Grande and sans serif....

Ozzpot · Feb 29, 2004, 10:13 PM

Yeah, I tend to find that the baseline is usually too low. When I finally find one that sits at the right level, it is often too extended (wide) resulting in missing / cut-off text in many cases, or Safari displays my bookmark bar as gibberish. I too have paid for this haxie, but don't use it. Until someone finds a truly perfect font that works as well as Lucida Grande but looks nicer, Silk remains disabled.

mrtew · Feb 29, 2004, 11:19 PM

Originally posted by Ozzpot:
Yeah, I tend to find that the baseline is usually too low. When I finally find one that sits at the right level, it is often too extended (wide) resulting in missing / cut-off text in many cases, or Safari displays my bookmark bar as gibberish. I too have paid for this haxie, but don't use it. Until someone finds a truly perfect font that works as well as Lucida Grande but looks nicer, Silk remains disabled.

Fonts that work just about perfectly and look normal but better than Lucida include Skia, Century Gothic, Gil Sans light, Florida, Chalkboard. For something cooler that almost looks fine in most situations try Graphite Light, Bank Gothic, Eyechart, Distro, and Technical. For the more adventurous into the realm of the supercool, try Identity, Kilroy Was Here, Necrotic Tissue, Bastard, Bisque, Olympus, Tarnished Halo, and STHHeti. I love silk as much as I hate Lucida Grande and have tried hundreds of fonts and those are the ones that I think look good and work reasonably well. Try them out before you dis (able) Silk!

Oh and for the Safari gibberish problem just get Tinkertool and set it for the same font you choose in Silk and your problems will disappear.

testnull · Feb 29, 2004, 11:39 PM

My favorite font for most uses is the Bitstream Vera Sans family. I don't replace the system font but I do replace all common web fonts with the appropriate member of the family, and the Mono variant is my favorite for coding. You can get it here.

NetworkShadow · Mar 1, 2004, 01:58 AM

Trebuchet MS, it's nice because it doesn't shift as much a lot of fonts tend to do.

HytestA · Mar 1, 2004, 07:58 AM

Mr Tew, the fonts you listed, where did you source them from, I ask because I have Bank Gothic but its one of those that doesnt sit correctly, I think its too low, and thats relevant for the Adobe and Bitstream version I have. Are many of them freeware ones, I want free ones

Hyte

theJoy · Mar 1, 2004, 10:17 PM

Agenda-Medium or Agenda-Light are very good and give close to absolute zero problems anywhere

chezpaul · Mar 2, 2004, 01:54 AM

Century Gothic for me.. Looks nice and clear.... and sharp....

mrtew · Mar 2, 2004, 08:05 AM

Originally posted by HytestA:
Mr Tew, the fonts you listed, where did you source them from, I ask because I have Bank Gothic but its one of those that doesnt sit correctly, I think its too low, and thats relevant for the Adobe and Bitstream version I have. Are many of them freeware ones, I want free ones

Yeah, I got them all free on various sites. BankGothic is my fav and I finally did find it free on one site. There is one version that works very badly and one that's almost perfect except for being a little too extended. The one that works is a TTF font. I don't remember where but you'll find it by searching the free font sites!

HytestA · Mar 2, 2004, 11:50 AM

Cheers for the reply, ill go hunting again for that version of Bank Gothic, i only have the bad ones,

wibs · Mar 4, 2004, 01:02 AM

I'm having a bit of trouble getting Silk to read my new fonts. They install correctly when I open them after downloading and click install, and Font Book displays them, but for some reason Silk pretends they don't exist. They're in ~/Library/Fonts/ by default, and I've tried moving them to /Library/Fonts/ to see if that helped, but it didn't. And, of course, none of them are marked as disabled in Font Book.

Thanks for any replies

HytestA · Mar 4, 2004, 07:44 AM

you need to throw the silk pref file away for it to see new fonts, this mean that you also need to register each time you add fonts. Throw the file and restart then after restarting open silk pref pane to create a new silk pref file. The new fonts will then be available.

macintologist · Mar 4, 2004, 09:32 AM

Could somebody post a screenie of their text-modified menu bar?

I like the Lucida Grande font but I think the current size (14 I think) is too big. If I was able to lower it to 13 or 12 I would be happy. TinkerTool has a place where you can change the system-wide menu font but it doesn't work!

Can Silk do this and how?

wibs · Mar 4, 2004, 03:47 PM

Originally posted by HytestA:
you need to throw the silk pref file away for it to see new fonts, this mean that you also need to register each time you add fonts. Throw the file and restart then after restarting open silk pref pane to create a new silk pref file. The new fonts will then be available.

are you serious? ouch. guess I'll do that in a week when my computer's due for its monthly restart...

Dale Sorel · Mar 4, 2004, 04:40 PM

Originally posted by HytestA:
you need to throw the silk pref file away for it to see new fonts...

Who told you that...I've added new fonts and they show up in Silk immediately

wibs · Mar 4, 2004, 08:00 PM

Originally posted by Dale Sorel:
Who told you that...I've added new fonts and they show up in Silk immediately

you're just lucky, i guess. it seems like a terrible way to do it, but new fonts wouldn't load until I followed HystestA's advice and tossed my prefs. I did have to re-enter my registration, but my fonts showed up too.

HytestA · Mar 4, 2004, 09:11 PM

Originally posted by Dale Sorel:
Who told you that...I've added new fonts and they show up in Silk immediately

common sense really, "if something doesn't do as it should, throw the pref file" its a practice i've picked up after many years on the mac and its the only way i can get new fonts to be seen in Silk.
Guess your one of the lucky ones

FB Eye · Mar 26, 2004, 12:41 PM

Now that we have a bunch of new themes available, what fonts do you guys use to match perfectly that new spiffy look?

Personnaly, I use Myriad Web which is pretty nice as a replacement for Lucida Grande...

bbxstudio · Mar 26, 2004, 03:27 PM

I use HelveticaNeueCondensedBold for everything - works extremely well for the most part. I also like Asperin-Overdose, but it's a little hard to read in some cases.

NetworkShadow · Mar 26, 2004, 08:20 PM

Originally posted by bbxstudio:
I use HelveticaNeueCondensedBold for everything - works extremely well for the most part. I also like Asperin-Overdose, but it's a little hard to read in some cases.

HelveticaNeueCondensedBold does look good, I think I'll give it a try.

iNeusch · Jun 11, 2004, 04:03 AM

Eurostyle looks nice, it's true I have a hard time finding a perfect font

optimus_prime · Jun 11, 2004, 11:07 AM

lately my fav has been redensek.
http://www.fontalicious.com/super/redensek.html
that or kravitz
http://www.fontalicious.com/super/kravitz.html

eyevaan · Jun 11, 2004, 04:46 PM

I know this seems a little lame but Verdana as a system font is a slight rounding of Geneva.

or there is always SlaughterHouse...

Actually I like OCRA but it lacks some of the special characters so it is pretty limited to that end.

If you don't have Silk, you can always change the language of the system that gets pretty exciting...

SitHHtiS� · Jun 11, 2004, 06:52 PM

Originally posted by bbxstudio:
I use HelveticaNeueCondensedBold for everything - works extremely well for the most part. I also like Asperin-Overdose, but it's a little hard to read in some cases.

I agree. Works very well on just about everything. I use Helvetica Neue.

mrtew · Jun 12, 2004, 06:59 AM

Originally posted by SitHHtiS�:
I agree. Works very well on just about everything. I use Helvetica Neue.

To me Helvetica Neue looks even more boring than Lucida Grande. For normal fonts I prefer Gil Sans. That makes every program look sharp. My Dreamfont is Spat Crumb though... but it doesn't have any numbers. Does anyone know what font it's based on?

http://www.fontfreak.com/authors/astigmatic.htm

MacMan4000 · Jun 13, 2004, 11:42 PM

You Dont need to delete the entire pref file to make newly downloaded fonts show up!!!!!

Open com.unsanity.silk.plist (its in /Users/YourNameHere/Library/Preferences/).
It should open in Property List Editor (if not then you need to download the XCode tools from the Apple Developer Connection website, its free to register)

Once you have it open in Property List Editor it should look like this:

Now all you have to do is highlight "Font Cache" and press delete. Save and quit. Launch System Prefs and silk should have all of your new fonts.

Viola! Presto! New Fonts!

iNeusch · Jun 14, 2004, 03:24 AM

Originally posted by MacMan4000:
Viola! Presto! New Fonts!

Nice

Gerrit Vanoppen · Jun 19, 2004, 04:24 AM

Originally posted by mrtew:
Oh and for the Safari gibberish problem just get Tinkertool and set it for the same font you choose in Silk and your problems will disappear. [/B]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK Tinkertool modifies anything but the Finder/Dock/Menubar and Silk (almost) anything but Safari bookmarks and tabs. If this is true, some areas (p.e. app menu's) will be affected by both ?
Also, Silk doesn't seem to affect lots of dialog windows. I suppose Tinkertool does ?

mrtew · Jun 19, 2004, 06:48 AM

Originally posted by Gerrit Vanoppen:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK Tinkertool modifies anything but the Finder/Dock/Menubar and Silk (almost) anything but Safari bookmarks and tabs. If this is true, some areas (p.e. app menu's) will be affected by both ?
Also, Silk doesn't seem to affect lots of dialog windows. I suppose Tinkertool does ?

It's hard to tell which is affecting what... that's for sure, but generally it seems like whatever Silk changes Tinkertool won't, and whatever Tinkertool changes Silk won't. You really have to use them together to get the full result... although probably 5% of fonts on the computer are still stuck on Lucida and another 10% are controlled by the individual applications in their own preference panels.

Now does anyone have an answer to my Spat Crumb font question posted above? I want to know what font it's based on.