Remove/disable foreign language fonts

Correct, neither can deactivate any fonts in the /System/Fonts/ folder. Which is what the message obviously states.

Taking a cue from the Typeface method, I tried to add the Supplemental folder fonts in Font Book. It refused to add anything already activated by the OS.

I then tried the same thing with FontExplorerX Pro and Suitcase. Both would add the fonts in another set, but they remained grayed out. You couldn't deactivate these fonts no matter how you tried to add them to the interface.

Rightfont was next, and it also didn't work. It would supposedly let me deactivate all of the Noto Sans fonts (it marked them as deactivated), but there they all still were in Office, the Adobe apps, etc. Any app not written by Apple.

Then Typeface. Following the instructions as written (adding the Supplemental folder, not the Fonts folder), you can indeed deactivate anything it adds. My font lists in Office, etc. went down to 50 or so fonts from over 250. All just from deactivating fonts virtually no U.S. speaking user ever needs. When you do for whatever project, you can temporarily turn them back on. This is what Font Book should be able to do, but doesn't let you since it insists on hiding all of these non-English fonts.

Apps like Office, the Adobe suite and others load in less than a third of the time when there aren't so many fonts to build a list for. They're also just plain easier to use when the entire list of active fonts fits on the screen instead of having to constantly scroll through a ridiculous number of ones you'll never use.

The last test was to see if it would hold through a restart. Yes, it did. Without even having to launch Typeface afterwards. They all remained disabled.

RBehymer wrote:

You say this is a simple 5 minute task for you, how about actually spending the 5 minutes to provide a fix to the rest of us who aren't programmers.

Deal.

I created a demo app on Github. You can access the project here: https://github.com/etresoft/MultiLingualFontLister

You can download the demo app at: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/etresoft/MultiLingualFontLister/main/MultiLingualFontLister.zip

Here is what it looks like:

There's all your fonts. Click the "Hide foreign language fonts" and the Arabic fonts go away:

Suppose you are more picky and you've carefully curated a list of your own favourite fonts in Font Book. Just pick your collection then:

To be honest, adding the language filter did take me longer than 5 minutes. It took 9 minutes. If some rando on the internet can figure it out and add language support to an app in 9 minutes, why can't Adobe?

I understand that people say this is Apple's responsibility, and I agree. But Apple fulfilled its responsibility and provided all of the tools a developer needs to make a listing like that available.

Until a way to hide fonts becomes available that's native to the apps, there is a way in the Adobe apps to do that by using the Favorites button.

Display the font list. Click the star by the ones you want to view so they’re black instead of an outline. Then click the star to the right of the class filter. Here I marked only four as an example. But now every time you go to the font list, it will always only show you your “favorites” until you click the star at the top off.

A bit of a nuisance as you need to keep clicking the star (Favorites) filter off to add others that aren’t already in your list, then back on, but at least you can keep the visible list to a minimum.

You can do the same thing in Illustrator and InDesign.

Two Solutions.

"Typeface"

Oh yeah. 

You gotta try this. 

1. Open Typeface

2. Choose File > Import…

3. Navigate to /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental

4. Import the ’Supplemental’ folder

Deactivate away. 

Font Heaven.

"Rightfont"

Download, go to system fonts. Deactivate most in one go.

Satisfaction.

Excited just to be able to share.

Rhonda Kinahan wrote:

First, thank you for taking time to help. The overabundance of foreign fonts is an ongoing irritation and I do appreciate any help. Note - I am not a programmer but I was very hopeful when I read your post, then downloaded the file and tried it. It didn't work for me. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Maybe there is something missing but I still have all my many foreign options - especially of "Noto." I don't know where to go from here. Do you have any suggestions?

The app I posted doesn't make any changes to your system. It just demonstrates that it is possible to filter fonts by language or by collection. If you want your apps to have those same capabilities, you will have to contact the developers of your apps and demand it.

In your screenshot, you are showing many additional fonts that are normally supposed to be completely hidden. These are fonts for "document support", as listed in this Apple Support document: https://support.apple.com/HT211240

You should never be seeing these fonts. The idea is that if someone sends you a document that contains one of these fonts, you will be able to open it, and maybe print it if you want, without any problems.

If you are seeing all of those, then whatever app you are using is just scanning your hard drive for fonts. That was what people did maybe 25 or 30 years ago. But even back then there were font managers so that people wouldn't have to keep manually moving fonts around depending on what document they were editing.

The point I was trying to make is that this is really, really easy. There is no reason for any app to not support the built-in font management capabilities of the operating system. It's been thirty years!

No. In Catalina and Big Sur, the System fonts are on a read-only System partition, and there goes your ability to remove them, even by disabling SIP security.

Rhonda Kinahan wrote:

that was 2015 and maybe something has changed since then.

The first Apple support document about fonts I can find was for macOS Sierra in 2016: Fonts included with macOS Sierra - Apple Support. I just happen to have a whole bunch of virtual machines for testing my app. I can check the progression of fonts since 10.9

OS version: Total number of font files (Number in read-only /System/Library + Number in read-write /Library)

2013, 10.9 - Mavericks: 275 (43 + 230)

2014, 10.10 - Yosemite: 282 (48 + 232)

2015, 10.11 - El Capitan: 305 (89 + 214)

2016, 10.12 - Sierra: 284 (102 + 180)

2017, 10.13 - High Sierra: 296 (114 + 180)

2018, 10.14 - Mojave: 309 (127 + 180)

2019, 10.15 - Catalina: 334 (333 + 1)

2020, 11.0 - Big Sur: 446 (356 + 90)

And here it is in a graph:

As you can see, there has been a steady increase in the overall number of fonts. There has also been a steady shift in fonts from the 3rd party /Library folder into the Apple-controlled /System folder.

Catalina had a major change to the security model, isolating the operating system into its own partition for added security. Big Sur introduced the new San Francisco font and stored it in /Library. The San Francisco font has special technological features for retina displays and user interface design on both iOS and macOS. It is designed to be used only in apps. Its licensing enforces this. Perhaps the big font shift in Catalina was in preparation for the introduction of San Francisco.

But all of this is specifically talking about files on disk. Apple has a long-standing policy that what developers may or may not find in the filesystem is not an "API". Apple only supports official programmer APIs. If a programmer makes use of the fact that a file happens to be in a particular location, they are taking a risk. Apple can move those files around at any time. As the chart above clearly shows, they actually do that.

Apple provides official font APIs. These are provided so that all apps on the system can handle fonts in the same way. If you organize your fonts a particular way using Font Book, you should be able to use that same set of favourites in other apps. That's the whole point of APIs. Otherwise, every app would be doing it differently. I used those APIs in my little demo app. The language metadata API was added in MacOS X Tiger 10.4 in 2005. The font collection API was added in MacOS X Lion 10.7 in 2011. These interfaces are over a decade old. Apple has done this before.

I remember when Apple deprecated an old, insecure networking protocol many years ago. "Deprecation" means that they announce to developers that they are going to discontinue some API. It is a warning that any developers who use that API need to switch to a newer alternative. So Apple announced that an old, insecure AFP network protocol would no longer be supported. Then, 9 years later, Apple disabled it. Every 3rd party NAS (Network Attached Storage) device in the world broke on that day. It seemed that 3rd party developers simply ignored Apple's communications until it broke their products. Then they blamed Apple, as did their customers. I remember it well. There was another incident too, with a 9 year delay. I can't remember the details of the other one. Remember, we are talking decades here. The years get confused in my old brain after a few of those. And now we have fonts, with almost the same 9 year timeframe.

Your point of being able to create a piece of code sounds simple for you in your skill set. The majority of us cannot speak that sort of language. You illustrated a potential solution with proprietary code, however simple it was for you but not so much for me. It seems reasonable for Adobe to listen to this idea.

My code is not proprietary. It is open source.

Adobe has 21,000 employees. You will have to ask Adobe why none of those developers could find 9 minutes out of just one day, over the span of 9 years, to make this fix.

PJ_CA wrote:

1- The fact that Apple permanently secured all the fonts that came with the OS removed the ability to us to used any other version that use the same internal font name. We don’t used different font just for the sake of being creative, we use different fonts because client used them and because they provide advantage to some documents. My fonts are not corrupt or incompatible, they get in conflict with the one that Apple installed.

There is no "Bauer" font installed in Big Sur. This is probably a good place for my obligatory link to Apple's documentation about fonts in Big Sur.

But, in theory, duplicate fonts could be a problem. The fonts that Apple provides with the operating system are very high quality and would likely be identical to, or better than, any client-supplied fonts. But if you absolutely must have duplicate fonts, then you might have a case where Apple's consumer market focus doesn't meet your needs.

So, just to see what level of support Apple provides for this, I did a test. I modified my app to allow user-specified fonts, bypassing font book entirely. Apple's API fully supports this, albeit many of the methods assume only a single font per name. But there are lots of methods to use, if you have a special case like this. Again, it was easy to add duplicate fonts to the system. The hardest part was finding a low-quality duplicate font where I could tell the difference. But I did find a junk version of Helvetica that I could test with. So again, we have the same conundrum. Why can random guy on the internet solve this problem in a few minutes and billion-dollar corporations like Adobe can't do it for years?

And why is the only "fix" for this problem being able to delete system fonts, potentially causing all kinds of problems? It's easy to have duplicate fonts. It would be a little more work to support this, but Adobe has thousands of employees and, one would assume, more technical ability in this area than me.

2- Not a single graphic designer want to have a system that run with so many active fonts. Period !

Maybe you should ask your 3rd party apps to give you some kind of font management system where you could identify just the fonts that you wanted to use on a daily basis and see only those. To be clear, Apple has provided such a font management system already, but your 3rd party apps refuse to use it. Supposedly there are other, 3rd party font management systems available. When I inquired with Adobe, that was their first suggestion.

I know, and have definitively proven, that Apple's system works. If your 3rd party software is not working, then that is who you should contact. Apple cannot do anything about 3rd party apps or 3rd party font management systems.

Yes, we want to delete from the system but who really want to mess with the SIP every day ?

I don't think you would be able to change any system fonts in Big Sur, event by disabling SIP. The system volume is a sealed package.

Check out Kurt Lang's Font Management in macOS. Read the section on macOS Catalina first, then back up, and read the Big Sur entry. These are in the first two browser screens.

I don't use any font management software other than Apple's Font Book.

This is an APPLE thing. Please stop blaming other developers.

I skipped Catalina, so perhaps it was as bad then too. But unlike for the better part of the last 30 years, there are now 100s of fonts that we, users, cannot remove ourselves. Not just foreign language fonts. But the 100+ of Noto, for example. Up until Mavericks, at least, we could go in and remove fonts from the system. Apple no longer allows that. Nothing to do with third party developers.

yes, perhaps as you’ve indicated above each software developer could build a workaround. Or...

Apple could allow us all to continue to work in the way we’ve been able to work for decades, picking and choosing our own fonts, beyond a dozen (even a couple dozen) the system requires, in our language.

Kurt Lang wrote:

And again, false. Apple created a new problem. We already had a tool for this - for decades! It's called a font manager. You are familiar with these, yes? Disable the fonts you don't need to see on a daily basis and all apps instantly respond.

And we still have this tool. it works fine. Font Book was never able to disable system fonts. Apple just moved all of the fonts into the read-only system area. However, the font manager is still there. It still provides ways to manage font collections and it still provides metadata for fonts. The problem is that 3rd party apps aren't using this font manager. They are just reading files from disk. Their font manager is nothing more than the Finder. The only way to prevent a font from showing up is to remove it from the hard drive.

Entirely, utterly false. Apple decided, not the user. Go ahead, try and use Iowan Old Style in Pages. Can't? Gee, I wonder why?

Because that is a document support font. If someone actually has Iowan Old Style and uses it in a Pages or Word document, they can send that document to anyone else using Big Sur and it will work with no problem.

What people are complaining about is not lack of fonts, but too many of them. And they aren't complaining about Iowan Old Style either.

But Iowan Old Style is a fascinating example. Why not try it? What happens? Fire up Word or some other app whose documents Pages can read and add some text in Iowan Old Style. Then open that document in Pages. Now Iowan Old Style is available as a font, but only in that document. Create another document in Pages, and you lose access to the font. But the key point is that this is just the menu. Pages' font menu, even with the addition of Iowan Old Style, is perfectly slim and usable. It doesn't have Al Nile, Al Banyan, Noto, or other fonts that seem to so enrage people. Why not? If this is something that Apple has broken and Apple has the responsibility for fixing, then why isn't it broken in Pages?

I have a third-party font manager called "Typeface", I think you can purchase it for around $20. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like the fonts can be disabled in a third-party font manager.

For some reason etresoft seems to be shifting to Adobe, the blame for the changes Apple made with Catalina and BigSur. Apple created this problem, Apple can and should fix it, so that it's system-wide, not to be dealt with by each application.

There is a piece of Apple software – Font Book – that is supposed to be doing this, that used to do this, that now doesn't.

The control of font display is at the hands of the developers. Apple loads the fonts it needs for the OS and some additional. They created the ability to create "groups" of fonts that the user controls and apps can access.

The App developer's need to use the API Apple created to manage fonts available to the user.

Yes, it has changed. The security model of the OS has changed. Font management has changed. Apple made it possible for apps to easily customize how fonts are displayed in the app, but the app developers must implement that change.

Apple has already done its part. Use any of the iWork Apps in Big Sur and you will only see only the native language fonts in the main font menu. You can get to the others by using the Font panel.

I would doubt Apple will change anything as they already "fixed" the issue. Spend your effort on the people who an actually provide the control you want. It is the app developers who need to spend five minutes to provide what you want.

spartantuba wrote:

According to etresoft, while they can't be disabled, they can be hidden from menus, using an Apple API.

Well, technically, Apple’s APIs are only necessary to pull collections defined in Apple’s Font Book. That’s Apple’s domain so an app developer would have to use an Apple API to access the information. The language metadata is inside the font itself, which, in theory, could be read without any Apple APIs, for those people who don’t want to use them.

Deciding how many, or which specific fonts, to list in a menu does not involve Apple code in any way. That is 100% the responsibility of the app developer. They could choose to implement their own filtering or grouping mechanism.

So far Adobe and Extensis have not done this, so either it's harder than it seems, or it's harder for them, based on how their apps work. That would be my guess.

I completely agree. Technically speaking, Apple could “fix this font problem”. Apple could simply move those fonts back into the /Library folder where they could be deleted. But this would be a major change due to the security structure of the operating system. There are many ways that such a change can go wrong. And even if nothing goes wrong, users are harmed because now there is no guarantee about which fonts are installed. I can guess who is going to be blamed for that when people’s documents are full of square question marks.

My point was to demonstrate that it isn’t objectively difficult do to this filtering and grouping. Obviously, mature apps with millions of users are more difficult to modify. But these are also objectively useful features. No one is harmed by being able to filter a font menu by language or collection.