How come certain fonts show up fine in OSX but not in Windows?

Posted on August 8, 2011 by mell9185

Our company recently decided on a font called Sketch Block to use for all our client presentations.  The font was an available as an OpenType from www.fontspring.com and TrueType from www.myfonts.com. Both versions contained a Bold and Lite version of the font. Our Creative Director prefers OpenType fonts so we decided to purchase a few seats for our all Mac Creative department and some of our VP’s running Windows 7.

After the first PowerPoint deck was created and passed around we immediately noticed a problem with the font. While Macs users could easily see and use the Bold and Lite versions, our Windows PC’s saw only 1 version of the font. In addition the font would show the Lite version as the default and the Bold version when the font was bolded on our Windows PC’s. This lead to the layout changes every time the file was opened a different platform then the one it was created on.

We tried contacting www.fontspring.com for support but they were so slow getting back to us that we decided to look elsewhere for a solution. In researching I came across a few sites that helped explain why this was happening:

Here is what was happening (please excuse/correct any wrong information). The issue boiled down to fact that Windows based OSes can only handle 4 font types in a font family:

  • Regular
  • Bold
  • Italic
  • Bold Italic

While Mac OSX can handle those types in addition to other types such as Lite, etc. So a when a windows OS comes across a type it can’t handle it will lump it into one of the existing categories. Now this doesn’t mean that Windows PC’s can’t handle fonts outside of those 4 types. It just can’t handle them in the same font family unless the creator makes the proper changes to the internal font properties. If these properties are set correctly a Windows OS can properly interpret font types outside its normal range without having to include the font in a separate family (E.g. Sketch Block and then Sketch Block Lite). From reading through the links above it appears this is something that trips up a lot of font creators.

While this info didn’t solve the problem it gave us an area to investigate, using a font editor called Font Forge I was able to set the properties of fonts to break them into separate families. So instead of a Sketch Block family with the Types of Bold and Lite, I made a Sketch Block Lite family and a Sketch Block Bold Family each containing its own type. With the old font removed and the new “tweaked” fonts installed on a Mac and PC client I was able to successfully create a document on each client and transfer back and forth without running into layout issues. The “tweaked” font didn’t experience any weird changes when opened on a different OS like the previous one did.

So the layout issues were fixed but a new non tech issue was created. Did changing the font properties violate the terms of use on the Font? We want to use this font to display our company logo, so it would be used in all external communications.  Would we get fined or sued because we edit the original work? We tried again contacting www.fontspring.com multiple times over a 3 week period and only got one response that they would look into it. We then tried contacting the creator who was located in Germany but the email address we found bounced back.

At this point I decided to give the TrueType version from www.myfonts.com a try. Oddly enough the font properties of the TrueType version were properly labeled so that it worked on both Mac and Windows OSes without any problems. It even worked with our current OpenType version, so we could keep our OpenType licenses for our Mac users and deploy the TrueType  version for our Windows users. While I wish www.fontspring.com was more response in either supplying an updated version or letting us know there was nothing they could do, I’m glad we were able to find a workaround in the end.

Posted in Fonts, OSX, Windows | Leave a comment

Blackberry Enterprise Server Express 5.x wont sync email deletions by default

Posted on July 8, 2011 by mell9185

One of the issues that my fellow employees brought to my attention after our Exchange 2010 and BESX 5.0.3 migration was that emails deleted in Outlook weren’t being synced as deleted on their Blackberries anymore. I noticed the issue on my Storm 2 but brushed it off as I started using my personal Samsung Focus as my main mobile work email device.

I doubled checked all the email settings local to my Storm 2 and everything seemed in place so I did some further  research and found that this option is disabled by default in a typical BES installation. In addition I came across the following information:

  • Only 25 Deletions at a time can be synced, this is apparently a hard limit and no work around is in place. So if more than 25 successive deletes are done, any over 25 will not sync once Hard delete reconciliation is turned on.
  • By default BESX will only track 100 emails at a time for a user. If any messages older than the rolling 100 are deleted it won’t be removed from the BB. This can be changed by increasing the maximum emails in the Message state database for each user. This does come at a very small RAM penalty, a formula for which is as follows: (64)  * (Messages kept in message state database) * (# of BB users) = Memory In bytes
  • RIM has a full breakdown here

Changing the settings in BES was pretty simple and I’m surprised Hard delete reconciliation is not turned on by default.  The steps are as follows:

  1. Login to the web console and expand Servers and Components -> BlackBerry Domain -> Component View -> Email
  2. When you see YOUR_BES_EMAIL on BES_SERVER_NAME, on YOUR_BES_EMAIL
  3. on the Messaging tab and then at the bottom of the page the Edit Instance button
  4. Under the Messaging options section look for Hard deletes reconciliation and change it from False to True
  5. You may also want to change the Message state database size under the Performance section (max is 1000)
  6. Full instructions from RIM

When it came to the Message state database size we bumped up the number from 200 to 1000 since the RAM hit for our 50 user environment (~3MB) was so insignificant. I plan to monitor the Memory usage just to be safe over the next few weeks.

 

 

Posted in BESX, Blackberry | Leave a comment

Exchange 2010 SP1 and Blackberry Enterprise Server Express in the case of the unapplied Throttling Policy

Posted on July 6, 2011 by mell9185

At my company we recently migrated from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010. One of the major steps in the process was migrating from Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.2 to Blackberry Enterprise Server Express 5.0.3 so we could support our 50 Blackberry users. RIM provides a great step by step install which can be accessed here.

One of the steps is to create a throttling policy for the user account Assigned to the BESX installation. By default Exchange 2010 throttles access to all the various components of Exchange in order to avoid any one user (or users) from taxing Exchange. The account assigned to BESX handles all the email forwarding for every Blackberry activated on your BESX server.  In order to avoid it from being throttled by Exchange 2010, and thus not able to forward emails to your activated BB’s, a throttling policy should be created for this user. While the how-to video RIM provides is nice, it hasn’t been updated for Exchange 2010 SP1. RIM instead provides a technical document with the updated info

One thing it doesn’t mention, and wasn’t obvious to me at the time, was that a throttling policy doesn’t take effect until the following services have been restarted:

  • Exchange Throttling Service
  • Exchange RPC Client

Having just put our Exchange 2010 server into production and with mailbox migrations scheduled we didn’t hadn’t restarted our Exchange server since creating and assigning the BESX throttling policy.

So as migrated users to Exchange 2010 and reactivated Blackberries on the new BESX server we started to notice that it was taking longer and longer for each successive Blackbery activate. Around the 10 user mark it started taking us more than a few hours to activate so we halted all migrations to Exchange 2010 to figure out what the issue was.

At first we checked our SPAM filters to see if the activation emails were getting caught, through there were a good deal of them caught whitelisting the emails didn’t fix the problem. Form there we checked the event log of the BESX server and saw a bunch of errors relating to failed activations, but nothing we could use to figure out what the problem was. So we checked the Exchange 2010 server and found our problem, the account to assigned to BESX was getting throttled. At first this didn’t make any sense since we knew the policy was created and applied as far as we could tell. So we ran the following PowerShell command to see verify the policy we created for the BESX account was applied:

Get-Mailbox besxadmin | fl Name,ThrottlingPolicy

The result was that the default policy was still applied; perplexed we reassigned the throttling policy:

 

set-Mailbox besxadmin -ThrottlingPolicy BESXPolicy

But the result was the same.  A quick Bing/Google search revealed the problem (Thanks to Chad McGreanor’s Post). After restarting both the Exchange Throttling and Exchange RPC Client service (in addition to restarting the BESX server) the activation delays were finally fixed.

 

Posted in BESX, Blackberry, Exchange 2010 | Leave a comment