10th May 2002

Image is everything, or so the television tells me. Here's Patrick Jarrett's problem - and solution. "Adobe Photoshop is one of my tools for school (and Web design), so when I tried to open it only to find an error that I had never seen, I was crestfallen. The snag was something along the lines of: 'There was an unrecoverable hardware error. Adobe will now exit.' I didn't know what to do. I went to #lockergnome [our chat room] and got some help. We went through the Adobe Support page and found an entry that pertained to my problem. It turned out that the source was a corrupt font. Now we get to the meat of my tip: ways to identify a corrupt font. I used the program you showed a week or so ago (Font List) and looked over the database of all my fonts. Well, I found one font that was just plain messed up. It looked like a Tetris game. When I tried to open Adobe, I got the same error and went through the list again. When the computer asks a font to display a character it doesn't have, it displays the box. I noticed several fonts had the tops of their boxes cut off. This shouldn't happen, since there was no overlap. If you look through your fonts and see a 'Tetris game,' or one with a sliver off the top oImage is everythingf the box character, then they are corrupt."