I Want To Trash Font Book - OK?

I would not trash it.

It only takes up a small amount of space.

Font Book is nothing more than another font manager. It has no importance to the use or operation of OS X. Go ahead and dump it if you want. Or at least move it off to an external drive so you can put it back if you need to for some reason.

If you don't want to use it, don't use it. There is no reason to delete or move it.

There is no reason to delete or move it.

There are valid reasons for removing Font Book.

If you use for example, FontExplorer X and disable a font that is in the the /Library/Fonts/ folder, or the Fonts folder of your user account, you may find that it is not disabled if Font Book says it should be open. Or, you restart and discover that every font you disabled with the font manager you are using is suddenly back on because Font Book's database says it should be.

It's a pain in the patootie to have more than one font manager on your system at a time, no matter who that software may be from. If you're not going to use Font Book, delete it. You'll have far fewer headaches trying to control your fonts.

Hello,

If you send the FontBook to the Trash and empty the Trash, your Mac will no longer boot. There are system wide fonts necessary to use the Mac OS X, from boot to shut down.

More on the FontBook here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2509

Carolyn 🙂

Message was edited by: Carolyn Samit

If you send the FontBook to the Trash and empty the Trash, your Mac will no longer boot.

That is completely false. The fonts in the /System/Library/Fonts/ folder do not disappear when you delete Font Book. They will stay where they are and your Mac will boot just fine.

On every Mac we buy, or install OS X fresh on, one of the first things to get deleted is Font Book.

Carolyn --
Font Book does not manage System Fonts.

I never knew that!!!!! I've always thought they were one & the same!

I took a peek at the system fonts. Now when will the system ever need those Chinese & Arabic fonts? Can I delete those fonts & the braille fonts from the System folder & substitute ones that I use 99.999999% of the time?

So glad I stumbled onto this thread. Sure is an eye opener.


I swear I learn something new every time I visit AD.

Hey BB --
Here's the deal --

The System fonts are all there for use by the System.
We don't need to worry about them.
And I never delete any of them, after an unfortunate decision I made
4 years ago to "clean up my System Fonts that I 'never' use."

The result of my housecleaning was a System that wouldn't work.
Not being a developer or programmer, I decided afterwards to never again
mess with anything that starts with the word "System." LOL!

For your normal everyday stuff, the User fonts are being used.
By the way, congrats on your "bug." It's WAY fun!

Oh well, I better leave well enough alone then. Thanks for the heads up & Missy Cyber Gnat thanks you.

All this for the sake of approximately 7MB of disk space.

But, BabyBoomer... I have read many of your posts and learned a great deal from you, so your knowledge of the FontBook, "delete or not" advice I will remember.

I've been to so many Apple workshops where they mentioned being careful about deleting certain fonts from the FontBook I guess it just stuck in my head. As for Missy Cyber Gnat, my cats are about to claw my screen apart. LOL

Carolyn 🙂

Other than trashing the Font Book application and plist is there anything else that I can jetison?

You can go to the ~/Library/FontCollections/ folder and empty it. If you were to ever put Font Book back on your Mac, it will recreate the basic font sets.

The main thing you will need to do is move all of the fonts in the /Library/Fonts/ folder and the ~/Library/Fonts/ folder (the one in your user account) to a new location, or they will always be "on". Suitcase Fusion, FontAgent Pro and Master Juggler cannot control those folders. On the other hand, FontExplorer X can enable and disable fonts in those folders, so there would be no need to move them.

FontExplorer X is free and can be set up to behave either like Suitcase Fusion (activate fonts in place), or like FontAgent Pro (copies all fonts to a working folder in your user account). Suitcase Fusion and FontAgent Pro have 30 day fully functional trial software you can download from their sites. I personally cannot recommend Master Juggler. It's a solid, stable font manager, but has numerous design flaws that make it unusable.