Cannot use fonts in Font Book - Please help

Just because I was on a bit of a roll, I dug a little deeper. 🙂

Turns outs this is a problem Apple themselves have created. It all goes back to where Seravek and the other fonts I mentioned earlier won't show up in Apple's own apps. Apple dumps a whole bunch of paired files onto the drive that go with each font installed by the OS. They're at:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/

Frameworks/ATS.framework/Versions/A/Resources/FontInfo/

While they've been included with the Mac OS for a long time, these dumb things now appear to be tied to SIP and have something to do with protecting the system from hacked versions of the fonts. That's my assumption anyway since this whole issue with "ghost" fonts started with the introduction of SIP. If the checksum (or whatever method Apple is using) doesn't match the info of these files, the fonts won't appear in Apple's apps. Third party apps can still use them, though. Which makes the entire idea of checking them in the first place entirely pointless.

How do these buried files figure in? Charter used to be in the list of OS supplied fonts that wouldn't work. In the 10.13.4 update, Charter was updated, and I presume also its matching support files. All of a sudden, that font started working everywhere! They also updated Iowan Old Style further back (don't recall which OS that happened in), but then that font suddenly stopped working and has been broken since.

Seriously. Why does Apple bother with these .ATSD and .fontinfo files? All they do is cause unnecessary problems.

Can you get around it? Yes, if you have a font editor and do nothing but generate a new, unique font file. I opened Apple Chancery in FontLab IV and did nothing but save it back out as a .otf OpenType PostScript font. And voila, now being considered a third party font, it appears everywhere, just like it already should!

Uh, oh! This could be another one of those mystery "ghost" fonts. There are a handful of OS supplied fonts that simply will not appear in any app written by Apple.

The current "ghost" fonts I know of are Athelas.ttc, Iowan Old Style.ttc, Marion.ttc, Seravek.ttc and SuperClarendon.ttc. You can use those in Office, the Adobe apps, and literally any other third party app that allows you to choose fonts. But they will not appear in TextEdit, Pages, or other Apple titles.

I just opened Preview now and Apple Chancery will not appear in the font list. Nor in Pages or TextEdit. But I have no trouble using Apple Chancery in MS Office, or any other third party app on my Mac.

Sorry for the unintentional runaround. I'd never had an issue with that font before either, so didn't think to check.

The Apple Chancery font is installed by High Sierra into /Library/Fonts. It would be available to you automatically, unless as Kurt suggests and for some unknown reason, the System font database has become corrupted. The process of booting into Safe Boot mode will rebuild that System font database, and upon a normal reboot, your access to Apple Chancery should resume.

To find out if it's system wide or user specific, try this...

Open System Preferences>Users & Groups, unlock the lock, click on the little plus icon, make a new admin account, log out & into the new account.

Does it work in the new account?

Ah, got it. It's another OS supplied font Apple has somehow partially screwed up. When I was quick testing yesterday, I simply missed it being listed in TextEdit. Right there in front of me, but looked right past it, despite being right where you would expect to find it alphabetically.

I had someone email me a while back that they couldn't use Zapf Dingbats in Pages. Sure enough, nothing you tried could make it appear in the font list. After much playing around, I finally discovered you could copy/paste Zapf Dingbats text you set in TextEdit into Pages. Sure enough, Apple Chancery did the same. Neither it or Zapf Dingbats will appear in the font list even after that, but at least you can get it into the document.

Once pasted in, you can keep typing in Apple Chancery, too, with Pages all the while continuing to pretending the font doesn't exist. It even matters where you paste your Apple Chancery or Zapf Dingbats text from. TextEdit - works. MS Word 365 - doesn't work. Using TextEdit as a bridge is the only workaround I've found to get a font into Pages it won't show you in its own list.

Preview is different yet again. It ignores any attempt to get a font into the app not in its font list. Apple Chancery won't show as a choice, and you can't copy/paste it in from TextEdit, or any other app. Here I tried to paste Apple Chancery in from TextEdit, and all I got was Helvetica. Just as with Pages, Apple Chancery is nowhere to be seen in the font list.

Maybe I can try and find a simple non-expensive one to try this to get Chancery back? LOL!

There's one free font editor I know of. The open-source FontForge. I goofed and wrote FontLab IV above. It's VI, not IV. But that's a pretty pricey app most users wouldn't spend the money on. Still, I would think FontForge would accomplish the same thing. Open Apple Chancery in FontForge and just generate a new OpenType font.

Also to note, Apple Chancery is an Apple copyrighted font. But, that copyright is listed as 1993-1999. So, does that mean Apple has dropped the copyright for this font? Meaning, is it legal for the user to generate their own version of the font so it will work as it's supposed to? Might be a question to ask Apple Legal. They may not care as long as it's for your own use (no distribution). But, still. I'd ask, first.

Is Apple aware of all this?

Yes. I've reported these broken fonts on their bug reporting site at least three times. I think the second time was during the beta of Sierra. They finally fixed them all (Athelas.ttc, Charter.ttc, Marion.ttc, Seravek.ttc and SuperClarendon.ttc at the time) in the beta 3 release. They remained fixed in the initial release of Sierra and the 10.12.1 update. Then the 10.12.2 update came out, they were all broken again, and have been that way since! They fixed Charter in High Sierra, but broke Iowan Old Style at the same time.

I reported it again sometime after that, but nothing has happened to fix these five fonts in over three years. The one and only way to get Athelas.ttc, Iowan Old Style.ttc, Marion.ttc, Seravek.ttc and SuperClarendon.ttc working is to get copies of these fonts from Yosemite and replace the ones included with any newer version of macOS with them. Then they magically appear everywhere - as they should.

Tidbit of extra info. If you pull a copy of Apple Chancery from Yosemite, that one also works everywhere. TextEdit, Preview, Pages, etc.

I think that's where you're at. Seeing the same problem in a brand new account always means the OS is damaged.

Make sure to first create a full backup of your system as it is. If anything goes wrong with the reinstall of the OS, such that the Mac won't startup to the main drive, you'll at least have a working backup you can restore.

Yup, because LibreOffice is a third party app. You can use these "ghost" fonts in any third party app as you should. But all apps written by Apple won't show them. Or in the case of Apple Chancery, TextEdit would, but not any other Apple apps I tried.

Whatever Apple is doing different with the OS supplied fonts, they really, really need to stop.

The iWorks fonts in Catalina moved to:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/FontServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Fonts/ApplicationSupport/

But yes, I don't get why Apple is trying to "protect" fonts installed by the OS. Or whatever is the reasoning behind this mess.

There was an issue several years ago where perps were using an old malware trick with fonts. The process goes all the way back to the days of MS DOS viruses. You attach malware code to a normal file. When the OS reads that .exe or .com app you launched, it was also forced to read the extra attached code. That's what they were doing to some fonts. The OS reads the font to load it, but also reads and loads the attached malware in the process.

That was blocked at least a few years ago, but I bring it up as the possible reason Apple appears to treat the included fonts as something that needs to be watched for tampering. That sounds logical until you think about it a bit.

Athelas.ttc, Iowan Old Style.ttc, Marion.ttc, Seravek.ttc and SuperClarendon.ttc will not appear in any app written by Apple. That makes you believe the OS doesn't trust these fonts. Well, if the OS thinks that, then they shouldn't load at all ! The fact that you can use them in any third party app means the OS did read and load these fonts at startup. If they were infected, then so now is the OS. So, what's the purpose of blocking them from appearing in their own apps? The answer of course is, none. If they were going to do any damage, it will have already happened by allowing them to load in the first place.

Side note: I tried the same little trick for Zapf Dingbats by pulling a copy from Yosemite. That one doesn't work. Apple's apps still won't recognize it in the font lists of Pages or Preview. You have to bridge the text across from TextEdit into Pages. And with Zapf Dingbats, you can only do that by first entering the symbols from the Character Palette into TextEdit, and then finally cut and paste from there into Pages or Preview.

For some reason Apple Chancery is at the bottom of the otherwise alphabetical list

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250113123

The venerable /Library/Application Support/Apple/Fonts/iWork folder is no more in Catalina after being installed by ten years of operating systems. I have a clean install of Catalina that was updated to 10.15.1 and I have exactly one font (Arial Unicode) in the /Library/Fonts folder.

I then updated Pacifist to v3.6.2 so I could peer inside Catalina installers, and there are no fonts in the base 10.15.0 Library, or in the updater. Just vapor. So yes, it is time for Apple to get their act together with fonts.