Back in the 1980s, the thing that set Macs apart from PCs more than anything else was the Mac’s support for different fonts. Over the years, font formats and how you work with fonts have changed, though things have remained fairly stable since Mac OS X became mature. However, despite the fact that there are oodles of fabulous fonts available for free download (at least for personal use), many people don’t realize just how worthwhile it can be to go beyond the fonts that ship with macOS.
Getting and installing new fonts is easy. You’re likely to find fonts in one of two font formats: TrueType and OpenType. TrueType fonts generally have the filename extension .ttf or .ttc, whereas OpenType fonts may use the same filename extensions or use .otf. macOS supports both, and both work fine, though if you have a choice, note that professional designers prefer OpenType.
If a font has a duplicate, it has a yellow warning symbol next to it in the list of fonts. In the Font Book app on your Mac, choose Edit Look for Enabled Duplicates. Click an option: Resolve Automatically: Font Book disables or moves duplicates to the Trash, as set in Font Book preferences. Resolve Manually: Continue to the next step to review and handle duplicates yourself.
When you download a font, you’ll usually get a Zip archive, that, when expanded, includes the actual font file (the one with the .otf, .ttf, or .ttc extension) along with a ReadMe or license file. (If the Zip archive doesn’t expand automatically, double-click it.) You can install fonts into Font Book, Apple’s bundled font management utility app, in three ways:
- Double-click the font file, and in the Font Book Preview window that appears, click Install Font.
- Open Font Book from your Applications folder, choose File > Add Fonts, select the desired font(s) in the Open dialog, and click the Open button.
- With Font Book open, drag the desired font(s), or a folder containing them, to the Fonts column.
If you’re installing just one or two fonts, go with the first method, since it’s the easiest. However, if you’re installing a bunch of fonts at once, either the second or third approach will let you avoid lots of repetitive clicking.
Keep in mind that fonts in macOS can be installed for just the current user or for all users of the Mac. If at least one font is installed for the current user and at least one font is installed for all users, you’ll see Computer and User categories at the top of the Font Book sidebar. Otherwise, you’ll see just All Fonts.
Once installed, fonts should be available to most apps right away. If you had a font panel open in an app, you might need to close and reopen the panel before newly installed fonts will appear. Or just quit and relaunch any apps that don’t see the new fonts. If all else fails, restart your Mac to ensure that everything recognizes the new fonts.
That’s it! Now that you’re up to speed on installing fonts, have some fun finding and using fonts that will give your documents added personality.
Among the several different characteristics that define the Mac, fonts are perhaps one of the oldest and most differentiating ones.
In fact, the Mac was the first computer with beautiful, varied fonts that were proportionally spaced and came preinstalled on every Mac as a result of Steve Jobs fondness of typography. At the time though, the decision was not too popular among tech enthusiasts, but we all know how essential it turned out to be down the road.
Did you know?: Steve Jobs learned about typography after he dropped out of college and started sneaking into classes that really interested him.Because of this early adoption of fonts by the Mac among several other factors, font management has always been a strong point OS X, making it easy even for amateur users to manage them thanks to the Font Book application (located in the Applications folder) built in on every Mac.
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Here’s an overview of the most important aspects of Font Book.
The Basics
Font Book is divided into three main columns. The Collection column on the left shows installed fonts divided by category. The Font column in the middle shows all fonts that belong to the collection you have selected. Then, the Preview pane on the further right side displays a sample of the currently selected font.
Previewing, Installing and Removing Fonts
From time to time, you might come across into a font that you like, or you might need to download one that your Mac doesn’t currently support.
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Once you have the font, all you have to do is to double click on it to see a preview in Font Book. There you can see all the font types using the drop-down menu at the top of the window or simply click on Install Font to install it on your Mac.
Removing fonts is even easier. All you have to do is select the font you want to delete, press the Delete key on your Mac’s keyboard and then confirm your choice.
Organize Your Fonts by Collections
If you have a set of preferred fonts that you would like to always have at hand, grouping them in a collection is quite easy. All you have to do is click on the “+” button at the bottom left of the Collection panel to create a new collection.
Once you do, just drag and drop all the fonts you want there.
Get Rid of Duplicate Fonts
One thing about the Mac that not many owners know is that duplicate fonts can sometimes consume a lot of memory, causing severe slowdowns. You can find out this is your case by using Activity Monitor to see if a process called “fontd” is taking a lot of memory. If it does, removing duplicate fonts can solve your issue.
To do that, on the Font panel of Font Book, look for fonts that have a yellow Warning sign beside them (this indicates they are duplicated) and right-click on them. Once you do, select the Resolve Duplicates option to get rid of the duplicate file.
There you go. Now you know the basics about Font Book and will be far better prepared whenever you need to manage your Mac’s fonts and perhaps will even be able to make it run faster!
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