Big sur has installed and activated great amount of fonts. How to deactivate unused fonts?

Howdy,

From Remove, disable, or enable fonts in Font Book on Mac

Remove fonts

In the Font Book app on your Mac, select one or more fonts, press the Delete key, then click Remove.

Removed fonts are moved to the Trash and aren’t available in Font Book or in the Fonts window.

Disable fonts

1. In the Font Book app on your Mac, select one or more fonts or font families, or a font collection.
2. Do any of the following:

• Disable fonts or font families: Click the Disable button in the toolbar above the list of fonts, then click Disable to confirm.

• Disable a collection: Choose Edit > Disable [Collection].

Disabled fonts are dimmed and labeled Off in the list of fonts.

Font Book is in your Applications folder.

ivan

Unfortunately, my article is no help for Big Sur. The OS is now a Signed System Volume, much like iOS.

There is no useful method for eliminating the slew of useless foreign fonts, like the over 100 instances of Noto Sans. Worse, Apple provides the user no way to turn many of them off, even though most are in the Supplemental folder. The name of which pretty much conveys they aren't crucial to the OS either. Apple also made the very frustrating choice to hide them from every one of the apps the OS installs, including Font Book. No listing, no way to even just disable them.

maclogix wrote:

Is there a website/blog/FB group that folks can sign up to and complain/educate Apple as to the importance of being in charge of the fonts on a professional design Mac?

There is something better, direct feedback to Apple:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html

MtD

The reason you didn't get an answer that works is because Apple has made it impossible to remove any fonts added to the System folder starting with Catalina. It allows apps to add fonts to that folder, so by the time you've installed Office, Creative Suite, etc., you have dozens and dozens of fonts you have to scroll through to find the right font. I do not need scores of foreign language fonts to create a t-shirt graphic, but they are all in the system folder and Apple has provided no way to remove them.

Your best bet is to read through Font Management in macOS, by Kurt Lang, but you're going to need to be comfortable using Terminal.

My best bet is likely going to be to avoid Apple products from now on despite having been a loyal user for decades.

Apple almost never responds to such questions. They get directed to customer service, engineering and such. If they get enough complaints/requests on a specific issue, they may provide a solution or fix. But unless it's critical, you usually won't see such changes until the next major OS release.

Is there a website/blog/FB group that folks can sign up to and complain/educate Apple as to the importance of being in charge of the fonts on a professional design Mac? As a designer and a self-employed Mac techie, I know none of my clients will move to Big Sur or buy M1 Macs until at least the user/techie can disable Supplemental Fonts folder. You can get round it very successfully in Catalina. Even if any techie signed up an NDA with use of a script?? Apple are holding up the progress of the new macOS and M1 systems.

Thanks Meg The Dog. I intend to canvas all my clients, their users, Mac techie colleagues and all Apple ID users to visit the link and I will supply them with some simple text that will inform Apple of their 'mistake' in adding so many useless fonts for professional design/printers/repro and font management in general. We (maybe tech support/advanced users) need to move the Supplemental Fonts folder to maybe the user Documents and manually add selected startup fonts to the root Library Fonts folder. It works fine with Catalina.

ArleighB wrote:

I was thinking of something similar, maybe the mac system could have an "activate when needed" set of fonts that have to live in the system but aren't activated by default.

It already has that. The problem is always the same - 3rd party apps ignore that "activate when needed" flag and show all fonts. As long as 3rd party apps continue to ignore all of this already existing metadata, this problem will continue.

ArleighB wrote:

I use Extensis Suitcase Fusion. Do you know of any font management software that is allowing us to hide or turn off fonts?

I would have thought that this is something that those font management apps would do for you. I have been involved in a number of these discussions, and even followed one over to the Adobe forums. Adobe also seems to think that this is something that 3rd party font management apps should handle.

I understand people's frustration at seeing all of those foreign language fonts. But I don't understand why they blame Apple. It is like the only possible way to manage fonts is to delete them from the hard drive. We aren't allowed to group them into collections. We aren't allowed to identify favourites. We aren't allowed to differentiate between those fonts that support our native languages and those fonts that don't. All fonts on the disk MUST be listed - no exceptions! But then what happens if someone actually does need Al Bayan one day? What do they do? Get on the internet and rail against Apple for making them reinstall the operating system to restore the font they deleted?

Apple has given 3rd party developers all of the tools they need to manage, organize, categorize, and filter fonts. But Apple doesn't force anyone to use those tools, so they don't.

Font Book can't change the 785 system fonts. Apple made sure of that.

I was thinking of something similar, maybe the mac system could have an "activate when needed" set of fonts that have to live in the system but aren't activated by default.

etresoft, thanks. I hadn't heard that. I use Extensis Suitcase Fusion. Do you know of any font management software that is allowing us to hide or turn off fonts?