Unwanted fonts!!
Why can't I remove all these Asian fonts that clutter my font list? There were Asian fonts before but now there are far too many.
I DON'T NEED THEM!!
Please make them removable with FontBook!!
grt,
Paul
iMac 27" 5K, macOS 10.15
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Best reply
I should clarify the paths. For "System", it's the /System/Library/Fonts/ folder. For "Supplemental", it's the /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/ folder.
It's not so much "it's good for you" as it is protecting the OS from malware. In Catalina, the OS is separated into a partition group (that's why APFS is required). The OS portion is on a read-only partition, which prevents any possible malware from modifying any files there, or adding anything to that location.
Since fonts are read in at startup, it's possible to infect a system by modifying them to contain unwanted code. Since any OS has no choice but to read in a font in order to use it, the attached malware would be read at the same time. This actually happened a few years back. Not to the Mac OS itself, but some OpenType fonts were going around that had been modified with attached malware. The OS has since been patched against that threat.
All of the included fonts are there because the Mac OS is a multi-national product. You and I may not use the Asian fonts, Devanagari, Gurmukhi or others, but someone does. This way, Apple only has to distribute one installer for any language. You don't see French (as an example) as a font because it uses English characters. It's the localized language files that take care of that difference. For French, the following are in every application package (along with quite a few others for various languages), which are French Canadian, and standard French, respectively.
fr_CA.lproj
fr.lproj
Anyway, if you'd like to read up on where this list derives from, you can read my article:
Required disclaimer: I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.
