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!