System? Hardware? OS? hard to diagnose without the platform at least.

Do you use a font manager (I assume you do, with that many fonts)? Do you have a recent backup?

Sounds like your file directory(ies) may be screwed up — bigger problem than just your fonts. Try disk utility(s) and see if that works, or at least finds a problem.

Not a lot of info to run off of (no system specs) - but can you think of anything that has recently changed on your computer system? Any new applications installed? Any recent updates? Font files don’t turn into XML without a reason. Can you open the XML files with a text-editor? Don’t save them after opening them but take a look and see if you can see anything of interest. Isn’t Jaws the not-officially-licensed-post-script-renderer? Maybe Jaws is converting the fonts - you might check your settings in Quark for that. Also use a web search to see if anybody else has run into something similar.

At any rate, good luck and I hope you can figure out what’s happening and how to recover from it.

I’m running Mac OS X v. 10.4.1. Disk Utility doesn’t spot any problems. Opening one of the xml files shows something like the following:

/Gentium (%psfont%Gentium) (r) file << /ResourceType /sfnt
>> /ResourceDecode filter
definesfntfontset 0 get definefont pop

...which says to me that this wasn’t a conversion but that it was left over from some other processes, and the fonts have been deleted somehow.

:(

Thanks for your help anyway,

—Jim