I'm in need of a good font file teacher.

Not a font teacher necessarily, but a font FILE teacher. Somebody who understands the complexities between Mac and PC, TrueType, PostScript, and OpenType. Somebody who understands what is going on in the tornado that is my type library.

I have, over my tenure at OnMilwaukee.com, amassed a nice collection of characters of all different flavors and I love the amount of access I have. Every flavor of Univers and Helvetica. Too many Calsons to count. But I frequently run into compatibility issues.

For instance, Flash refuses to read some fonts while Microsoft Office claims others are corrupt (a word you never want to see on the screen). When I type in Firefox I have to place at least six spaces in front of my cursor because it's not tracking correctly. In fact, as I typed this, the word "not" (in the last sentence) just disappeared beneath the bounds of the text field in which I am typing. When I attempt to place my cursor at the end of a line the program accurately READS it's placement as the end of the line, but it visualizes it incorrectly in the middle of the last word. When I view webpages, the links are frequently nestled up against the previous word, as if a space were missing, and sometimes they're even running OVER the previous word.

I tried sorting through my font files and thought I made some pretty good headway in deleting a bunch of duplicates (I had a couple of folders that FontExplorer was drawing from) but as I opened FontExplorer today, I noticed I had three versions of Verdana...two of them TrueType and one of them OpenType even though...as far as I can tell...I only have ONE Verdana file in my font folder. Where are these things coming from?

So I'm in need of a good font wrangler, the Pecos Bill for my font whirlwind. Somebody who can explain why this font isn't working, or that font is duplicating. It doesn't seem like it should be this hard, but for being such small file sizes, these things can cause some pretty large headaches.

As a side note, I'm noticing that this would have been accompanied by an excellent illustration, so forgiveness for the lousy haiku. Perhaps it'd be worth it to find some time to right this wrong.

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