“What do you get when you cross a font geek and the latest Snow Leopard update?” It sounds like the beginning of a really lame joke, but it’s exactly what some of us went through last week after applying the 10.6.7 Software Update.

Apple’s forums are filled with threads like this one about people having problems with various applications, most notably Adobe apps and PDF production, though it was noted to pop up in other places as well. It seems that it’s somehow tied to OpenType fonts and Apple’s implementation of the PostScript rendering engine.

With my affinity for type, it was surprising that I didn’t notice this right away. It was even more surprising how I came across the error. Apparently, font rendering in Motion (and, by extension, Final Cut Pro) is handled in a similar way as printing, so as I was rendering out one of our instructional videos, the text fields came out with missing letters.

After some reading about other people’s problems, I conducted a few very informal tests and came to the conclusion that the problem had to be in Apple’s rendering engines; non-Apple apps I tried had no problems printing. However, as the font we use in our videos is an OpenType font, and we use Final Cut (an Apple application) for editing/rendering, we still needed a solution. Unfortunately, the only effective solution we could find was to go back to 10.6.6. Article Continues…