How to fix a Nik Software plug-in crash in Snow Leopard — 12 Oct 2009

Since I installed Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6) one of my Aperture plug-ins stopped working, crashing Aperture when launched (a horrible experience).

I have several of Nik Software's plug-ins installed, but only Dfine 2.0 stopped working properly.

Nik Software's tech support answer was,

Snow Leopard is very sensitive with regards to duplicate copies of fonts. All of the Nik Software plug-ins utilise Arial fonts. Removing all duplicate copies of the Arial fonts corrects the issue.

You'll find the detailled procedure on how to identify and remove duplicate fonts in Nik Software's support document. Kudo to Nik Software. These guys responded promptly and in details to my support request.

The truth is that it didn't work for me. Font Book didn't reveal any duplicate Arial fonts at all.

It turned out the clearing the font cache did the trick, and is the tip I wanted to share with you.

There are third party applications that do this, but I'm not familiar with them. Here is a quick run through on how to clear your font cache in 10.5 or 10.6 with the Terminal (Application > Utilities):

1. Quit all running apps;
2. Type the following command to clear the cache atsutil databases -removeUser
3. Type the following command to restart the ATS server (Apple Type Solutions Server?)
   atsutil server -shutdown
atsutil server -ping

It might take a second or two for the server to restart. If anything still looks weird, a logout and login should take care of any niggling issues.

Hope this helps.

Afterthought: it is not recommended to clear the font cache, unless you're having a problem that you specifically suspect is related to a corrupted font cache.