Getting an error about an incompatible Extensis plug-in when opening an Adobe Creative Cloud application

Affected versions

This article applies to all versions of Connect Fonts.

Symptoms

When you open Adobe After Effects, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InCopy, Adobe InDesign, or Adobe Photoshop, you get an error dialog. Clicking OK causes the application to open normally, but font auto-activation doesn’t work.

Solution

1. Check if your auto-activation plug-ins are out-of-date:

The currently-installed plug-in is incompatible with the version of Connect Fonts you are currently running; this can happen if you’ve updated Connect Fonts but haven’t updated the plug-ins. This can also happen if you have migrated from Universal Type Client to Connect Fonts without updating the plug-ins.

You can check the status of the plug-ins by opening Connect Fonts and choosing Connect Fonts > Manage Plug-ins. The plug-in version should match that of the version of Connect Fonts that's installed.

Click Install All Plug-ins; you may have to enter your macOS administrator password.

Once the plug-ins have been updated, close and reopen your Adobe Creative Cloud application; the error should not appear and auto-activation will work normally.

2. Plug-ins showing as up-to-date, but still not working:

Try uninstalling and reinstalling the plug-in for the Adobe Creative Cloud application where auto-activation isn't working.

You can uninstall the plug-in by unchecking the checkbox next to the plug-in, waiting a few seconds, then re-checking the box to reinstall it. You will need to close and reopen your Adobe Creative Cloud application to reinitialize the plug-in once reinstalled. Once that's done, auto-activation should work normally now.

3. Still not working? Try quitting the Connect Fonts background process

If the first 2 options did not resolve the issue, you can manually quit Connect Fonts as well as its background process:

1. Quit Connect Fonts.app and any open Adobe Creative Cloud applications
2. Open Activity Monitor.app (located in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder)
3. On the CPU tab, use the search function in the upper right corner and search for "fmcore"
4. Highlight the fmcore process by selecting it in the list (like highlighted blue below)
5. Click the 'X' in the menu bar to Quit or Force Quit the fmcore background process
6. Re-launch the Connect Fonts.app and your Adobe Creative Cloud application and see if that helps