09/20/2004: Well, I went ahead and reinstalled the operating system at the end of last week, downgrading to 10.3.4. Amazingly it didn't help. Right now I'm working with severely curtailed number of fonts and I'm slowly adding the others back, taking a very patient wait-and-see approach. Whether a single corrupted font has been causing the problem I can't tell. Font Doctor X doesn't report anything too unusual, but there is clearly something going on between the system and font menus, perhaps dealing with the menu manager part of the system (about which I know nothing). In any event, I've been able to function with the bare minimum of web fonts and a few select fonts for other specialized applications, but it's frustrating not to be able to add and use fonts in a more willy-nilly fashion.

Again, more news when it happens.

09/16/2004: I've been battling a deadly font problem for the last few days. Microsoft Word and other apps that don't use the Panther font palette to select fonts have stopped listing all installed fonts in their various font menus. I've been able to add/reinstall fonts one at a time and tediously check whether the new font is recognized, but at some point the communication breaks down and I'm suddenly reverted to the initial stage of random subsets of fonts being available. I think it has something to do with Carbon applications but I don't know how font information is conveyed to those apps by the system, if that's even the cause of the problem (I'm not 100% positive which apps are Carbon and which are Cocoa, but I do know that if the font palette is available to an application it does not have the problem). At the moment I'm desperately trying to avoid reinstalling the operating system because that's, well, just so... Windows. However, I may not have a choice...

More news as it happens.