What happens if I create a collection with all the fonts on the drive?...Do the fonts get copied to somewhere in the system drive?
Whether you create a collection, or activate fonts without first creating one, all fonts you activate are copied to the Fonts folder you chose in Font Book's preferences. Normally, it's the Fonts folder in your user account.
There are so many fonts that I don't want to mess the system...
Too late! 😉 (We'll fix it in a moment)
I created my new collection, with over 6000 fonts, and font book hangs the whole system.
That's
way too many fonts for just about any font manager. For Font Book, it's worse. It's intended for light use by the typical home user.
"Adding a font to a collection doesn't move the font itself, but only places a pointer to the font in the collection."
Very strange the help file would say that. Font Book has never worked that way. It always copies the fonts you activate to the Fonts folder listed in its preferences.
To fix the problem, follow these steps.
1) Go to the Fonts folder in your user account. That's where all of the fonts it copied should be if you hadn't changed Font Book's defaults. Otherwise, they'll be in the /Library/Fonts/ folder. Create a new folder on the desktop (or anywhere you like that isn't in a Fonts folder).
Move all of the fonts to the new empty folder. Empty out both of them if you want.
2) Follow the steps in
Undoing Font Book. Note that you will lose any font collections you have created. Doing this will also clear the font cache files for your user account. This will also clear out Font Book's database, which is corrupt from trying to bring in so many fonts.
After that, you should be back to just the fonts in the System folder and whatever is left in the /Library/Fonts/ folder and the Fonts folder in your user account, depending on which Fonts folders you emptied out.
Now, never use Font Book again and download FontExplorer X per BDAqua's link. When you first launch it, it can be set up to behave like Suitcase and activate fonts in place. Meaning, they're activated right from where they are and aren't copied anywhere.
