One day after upgrading my Adobe products via the Adobe Updater, I decided to start Illustrator to work on some diagrams. To my dismay, the program was hanging; it displayed “Reading fonts…” for several minutes. I forced quit the app, then it hung at “Initializing…”.

Initially, I thought I had a problem font so I disabled all my fonts except the usual culprits, ie. Arial, Helvetica, etc. That didn’t work either. So, I re-installed Illustrator — and that didn’t work. Ugh!

I googled some more to see if other users had similar issues. Luckily, I used more-specific words, like “Adobe Illustrator CS2 hanging reading fonts”, for my search and I located this article, “InDesign and Illustrator CS or CS2 fail to launch after applying the Mac OS X Acrobat 8.2 update.”

After performing the steps listed under Solution 1, I tried to start the program again. Lo and behold, the program was starting right up! Success! *Happy dance*

Below are the steps, if the above link fails…

Replace the corresponding files present in the “ /Library/Application Support/Adobe/TypeSpt/Unicode/Mappings/” folder with the one attached to this document.

1. Download the attached Mac.dmg file (another location) to a machine where the issue is seen.
2. Close all Adobe applications
3. Double Click the Mac.dmg file to mount it.
4. Copy Mac folder from mounted image. Paste it to /Library/ApplicationSupport/Adobe/TypeSpt/Unicode/Mappings/.
5. A message appears to confirm to replace the existing ‘Mac’ folder. Replace the ‘Mac’ folder.
6. Launch Illustrator or InDesign CS or CS 2.

Update: [13-April-2010] This tip seems to work whenever Acrobat is being updated lately. My Acrobat was updated yesterday and Illustrator hung once again, but the above fix worked again.

Update: [09-July-2010] This tip also seemed to fix my Photoshop after an update as well. Whew!

After spending much time hacking my webpage’s CSS to render well in IE6, there were decisions made that we would drop IE6 support and focus on the new IE8. I thought this was wonderful news since the page tested wonderfully in IE8.

Anyone who knows IE, knows that wasn’t the end of the story. As I relayed the test URL to my peers, who also had IE8, they were pinging me to let me know that it looks terrible in their browsers. I thought they were kidding until receiving screenshots.

After much research, it seemed liked IE8 was making the page appear in Compatibility View for my co-workers — which makes the page render like it was being viewed in an older version, ie. IE7. I clicked on the “Compatibility View” button on the browser toolbar and lo and behold, I saw what they were seeing. Ugh!

After spending countless hours trying to modify my css, I wondered if I could force IE8 to make users view the page according to IE8 standards only. I googled a bit and located a forums thread on the MSDN site.

Within this thread, it linked my to an article that allows developers to specify compatibility modes on a per-page basis by using a simple META tag, which looks like:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />
You can specify other browser versions from IE5 on up.

Now, it forces users to view the page in IE8 based only on IE8 standards. Whew!