Take Control of Fonts in Mac OS X

#1 MW Forums

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Posted 05 July 2006 - 09:40 AM

Looking to trim some unwanted fonts on your Mac? Then you face two challenges: how to remove fonts and which ones you absolutely shouldn't get rid of. In this excerpt from Take Control of Fonts in Mac OS X, Sharon Zardetto Aker walks you through the steps of removing fonts you no longer want. more

#2 mr_rsu

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Posted 05 July 2006 - 01:23 PM

You know the greatest mystery about Mac OS X since the very first version of OS X?
Font Book not being a part of the System Preferences.
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#3 tmedia1

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Posted 05 July 2006 - 01:47 PM

One thing I have not understood about Mac fonts since moving to OSX is whether or not we (Mac OSX users) can use PC fonts. I know in the OS9 days, you could not interchange the two, but are they one and the same now?

#4 fds

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Posted 05 July 2006 - 06:02 PM

In reply to:

You know the greatest mystery about Mac OS X since the very first version of OS X?
Font Book not being a part of the System Preferences.

Since the very first version?
Font Book only debuted in 10.3 Panther. And of course it's not a system preference, it's a separate application with a resizable window.

In reply to:

I know in the OS9 days, you could not interchange the two, but are they one and the same now?

Windows still doesn't understand Mac-specific resource fork or dfont suitcases, but Mac OS X can pretty much use anything.

#5 dubblezz

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Posted 05 July 2006 - 10:54 PM

the easiest way to clean the font folders it to use the free fontbrowser FontExplorerX. In the tools menu you find the option clean system fonts folders...
georg

#6 NotarySojac

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Posted 06 July 2006 - 10:56 AM

In our experience most PC TT fonts work in OS X. PC PostScript fonts work much less often, especially those Type 3 PostScript fonts from the late '80s.
About 10-20% of the PC TT fonts we download from online sources (DaFont, BlamBot, etc) - even those that explicitly say "PC & Mac TT" - either are not recognised by FontBook, or get flagged as bad in FontBook's validation. By "not recognised" I mean that you can double-click them 'till your finger falls off and they will not appear in FontBook or even open a preview window. FontBook will launch when you double-click the font file - so OS X knows it's a font - but no preview/sample window opens. Likewise trying to add them via Add Font or by dragging the font to FontBook's window. Some of those fonts work just fine if you manually add them to your Fonts folders but others get flagged by FontBook as bad and others will not appear in FontBook at all or in some applications' font menus.
I am trying to get everyone I support to use the guideline - "if FontBook doesn't like it don't force Tiger to use it."

#7 whitedog

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Posted 09 July 2006 - 02:19 AM

Thanks for posting this article. Though I've actually bought the Take Control of Fonts in Mac OS X ebook from which the article is excerpted, I haven't gotten around to reading it. The article was narrowly focussed on an important part of the book which enabled me to do some much needed font maintenance. Among the most useful information is what fonts belong where and which ones you need and which ones you can do without. In particular I was able to complete the removal of various foreign language fonts that I never use but which clutter up font menus just the same - except for the ones specifically mentioned which must remain, information that is otherwise hard to come by.
I also learned about a feature of Font Book of which I hadn't previously been aware: You can create font collections in Font Book made up of fonts outside the various system font folders and that Font Book can manage these fonts non-distructively - just as, for instance, Linotype FontExplorer can.
And, for what it's worth, I did my font house cleaning manually, since you can never be sure what a particular font program is doing. Now that I have the basics taken care of I will be using FontExplorer to manage my fonts from now on. It is more full featured than Font Book, less quirky, and is free besides.