I'm the new guy to this forum and here's my quandry:
I'm the designated test monkey for a G5 at my company. I'm running Panther with Font Book and as a designer/prepress type person I need to find ways to stress test my machine to ensure the tech support department knows what to install, what not to install and how to head off potential disasters.
In my preflight capacity, I need to ensure absolutely NO extra fonts (family types excluded) are sent to the vendor. I need to ensure someone isn't using an unsupported menu style on a font (like an italic for which there is no postscript equivelant), and that there are no true type fonts being used. This means my system fonts have to be the bare minimum to view menus and other OS related windows and dialogues.
What I can't have is Font Book loading and activating fonts from different folders that I can't locate or control (I've heard rumors it pulls them from 70 or so different places but I can only confirm four). One of the problems I've encountered with Font Book was how it selects which font to activate and use when there is more than one with the same name in existance somewhere (how can I tell which one it's using when it pulls them from different locations?).
What I do is delete all unnecessary fonts from the system and load only those that are needed for a specific job; if I'm missing some, fine, I'll go track them down. If there are extras, fine, that will be resolved when I collect for output. But now I don't have that choice, Font Book is using a system font for a print job that I need to send to a vendor. Some characters, such as an apostrophe, show up on screen but not on the printed page. Font Book gave priority to the true type screen version of the Times font and would not load the version that came with the design file. This is unacceptable.
Attemps to disable the system font, with the job fonts already loaded, failed since Font Book would still activate the system version when it noticed the font was supposed to be used for something. I had to remove the job specific fonts from Font Book, then disable those same fonts in the system, then reload the job fonts into Font Book. This is also unacceptable since it increases the amount of time to preflight and troubleshoot a file.
Incidentally, if you haven't already heard; Font Book will physically move fonts that you are activating by moving them to your font library. This is the default setting, and to avoid it you'll need to launch Font Book, then select the preferences from the Font Book pulldown menu and select the checkbox at the bottom of that window (the exact title of said checkbox escapes me at this time).
In OS9 I could remove unwanted fonts easily, I would drop the fonts from the system folder into the trash, then load the fonts I wanted into the folder, restart the machine and all would be well with the world.
So in my quest to strip out all extraraneous fonts, I dumped the fonts out of all my libraries. This seemed to work well enough until I tried dumping them from my System Library. Immediately, the machine stopped recognizing characters and keyboard input , I was left with a flashing menu bar and eventually a blue screen of death with no way to access the machine to correct it.
I had Panther reinstalled and figured (erroneously as it turned out) that I could load the system fonts I needed into the system folder then delete those I didn't need, this should give the system something to work with. Again, in OS9 if you dumped a font that the system was using, the system would default to another one, provided there was another one available in the system folder. Panther doesn't work that way. If you take the fonts out of the system folder, the machine is totally incapable of selecting a replacement and I was left with the flashing menu bar and requisite blue screen of death once again.

Now, the first time it happened it took about three hours to reinstall Panther and download the updates, I'm hoping to avoid this by asking if there is a way to tell the idiotic machine to use another font from its system library (there are at least 15 others still in the folder)?

We've also tried FontReserve, it proved untenable as well and incapable of supporting our workflow. It also imparted odd settings into the documents we were working on which would sometimes cause problems at the vendor. It's database would also immaculately corrupt itself about every 10-14 days and would require recreating a database file, then reloading everything that had been lost. All of these problems equal serious money and increased overhead we all hope to avoid.

Any recommendations would be appreciated.

BAD