Killing Chicago? The Font Apple Doesn't Want You to Use


Missing Chicago font in OS X? You're not alone.

A reader at O'Grady's Powerpage says that Chicago is gone from this year's Macs, which don't boot up in OS 9, of course. The reader called Apple support who thought that Chicago might be available if Classic were installed. An attempt at dropping Chicago into the Fonts folder failed.

Other users reported different experiences. A PowerBook-12 owner said he could use Chicago and Charcoal as default fonts in Mail.

Analysis: A workaround is to use TinkerTool, which can change some default fonts. But since I don't have a 2003 Mac lying around, I can't test this on a newer, non-OS 9 machine. TinkerTool can set your menu bar clock/date to whatever font you want, and also works with System Pref panes. But the rest - menu bar, window bars, Apple menu - are all default OS X font. And, admittedly, Chicago looks, well, crappy, when it's anti-aliased. Given that it looks fine in Classic, it's a pity that it can't look good on the 'killer graphics' OS X.

Then again, Apple Garamond has been unceremoniously dumped from Apple's web site and Macs as well. Whatever the new one's called, it's not as elegant.