I am currently testing with a few other users the workflow before validating the use of this software for a team of about 30 people.
On my MacBook Pro M3 it works from the start with no issues, but on the desktop of the three studio operators which I’m testing on, the font activation doesn’t work.
It shows a small red message « Fonts cannot be activated ». However the fonts are correctly copied inside the root folder but they aren’t activated.
Oddly enough, after reinstalling a few times and changing root folder it manages sometimes to activate a single font before stopping working again.
I’m trying to activate only the provided Google Font so it should not be a network/permission issue ?
What I’ve tried :
Reinstalling FontBase.
Changing the root folder to a folder on the desktop, with permissions set to read/write.
Deleting the « hidden » fontbase folders and files in the Library folder and reinstalling the app.
Specs :
MacStudio M1
MacOS Tahoe 26.5.1
Hopefully this can be resolved as we want to find a new font manager for the whole studio and this one, when it works, works great
Actually, we first tested with the fonts from our server and it didn’t work.
Only then we tried with Google Fonts afterward as it removes the potential permission issue from our server setup, and it didn’t work either
Thank you for the quick reply and the additional infomation @ChrDelMG
Does the situation repeat itself when you do the same actions with fonts on a local drive?
Sadly it didn’t work.
We tried to add a fond from the Desktop folder but it failed exactly in the same way.
I have a Apple M3 Pro and they have a MacStudio M1, could that explain why it works in my case and not theirs ? I’ve checked, the OS is exactly the same version and I can’t see any other differences.
Thank you for the quick reply @ChrDelMG
That is a very good question, working on it at the moment since this is definitely not as things should work.
Was FontBase installed on the machines having these issues with admin rights?
Sorry I don’t understand your questions. Their account is local administrator of their desktop. There’s no admin rights issue to take into account if it’s not working even from local folder to local FontBase installation, am I wrong ?
Thank you for the quick reply
Sorry for phrasing the question in a weird way, but yes, there shouldn’t be any read/write/access rights issues if the users of those machines are their local administrators.
Don’t worry about the phrasing, we were able to understand each other
I hope you’ll be able to find what is going wrong, we really want to try this tool in the studio as a replacement for FontExplorer X Pro.
Thanks you in advance for the help !
So finally we found a ways of activating fonts, this is messy and near unusable but it could help pinpoint the issue.
First, when you open the software and quickly activate a font, it works. And it will work as long as you activate a font at least every two seconds or so.
Once you stop activating fonts and wait a couple of seconds it will now fail to activate more fonts.
Hopefully it helps you find what the issue is
Have a great day and thank you in advance for the help !
Hello @ChrDelMG , thank you for very much for the additional information and a quick reply, also sorry for the delay
Still puzzled as to where the cause of this behaviour might be, unfortunately. Does it matter if the app was installed to be used by all users or current user only (should be to pick one of the two during installation) ?
Hello !
The installation on Mac is simply to drag and drop the .app in the Application folder, it’s not like Windows where you are able to choose installation settings.
Since then, I tried on one of the workstation to launch FontBase with full disk access, it didn’t work after a few seconds.
Then I tried with a connection to my own phone 5G hotspot, so it was not on the organisation network, and it still failed.
I’m out of idea and can’t get why this works fine on my computer but not others, even similar one.
Thank you for the quick reply @ChrDelMG
Yes, you are absolutely correct about the installation process, apologies for the confusion.
A question I should’ve asked earlier, just to clarify about the other Macbook Pro M3 - does it have any relation to your organisation, or is it a personal machine outside of it? Trying to find a common denominator between where everything works as intended and where it doesn’t.
All desktops and laptops involved are from the organisation.
Tested to create a new local admin account on the mac and this is working on it. Sadly we have a lot of desktops and creating new sessions for everyone will be difficult.
They are currently already on a local admin account for your information.
Any idea on how to proceed ? We tried resetting the permission on fonts and fontbase folder in Application Support but it didn’t work.
Thank you for the quick reply and the additional investigation
Given all the information it seems that the cause of the issue is in the way the computers in the organisation are set up (internal security reasons probably), it is very unlikely there is anything we can do on our end to override this I’m afraid
Would it be possible to consult with the people responsible for setting up the machines as to whether there are any changes that can be implemented to the existing user configurations in bulk? This would be one way of avoiding making the changes individually for every user.
