FONT BOOK: How to delete some non-favourable fonts?

Had to retest. Forgot I had almost every font in the Supplemental folder disabled with FontMenuCleaner.

Turned them all back on, then added all of the languages again. Font Book now showed many more fonts that were grayed out before as normal, and many of them could be disabled. But at the same time it works against you by not letting the user deactivate fonts that are required by some of the active languages. It also still refused to show the worst offender. The 100+ Noto Sans fonts in the Supplemental folder.

Basically, FontMenuCleaner is still the best and inexpensive solution. Essentially, it's a font manager specifically for the fonts in the Supplemental folder. That eliminates the majority of the fonts you don't normally need active all the time for third party apps. Nice, short font lists, and you can still turn them back on if needed.

There are some third-party apps that can disable many (but not all) fonts that Font Book cannot disable.

Like this one:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/font-menu-cleaner/id1576868937?mt=12

Hi Josdn-t,

Thanks for reaching out using Apple Support Communities. Here to help.

We understand you are trying to delete certain fonts from your Mac.

Reviewing the resource linked below, it does appear that certain fonts cannot be disabled or deleted if they are considered to be System Fonts. This will help the operating system display this font if it comes across it on the web or in files. You should be able to remove some fonts using the steps outlined below.

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

Hope this helps! Take care for now.

Josdn-t wrote:

Thanks for your advice. However is there a way to know which fonts are System Fonts ?

Technically speaking, they are all system fonts. It is just a quirk of luck that most of them can be disabled. Those that are absolutely necessary cannot be disabled. If you ever start getting documents with squares or question marks, then you might need to review which fonts you have disabled.

Kurt Lang wrote:

Word wouldn't have been able to see these fonts, either. Still a good thing to mention for others trying such testing.

Yes. That's right. Good point.

But the issue for many users (mainly publishing) is it shouldn't be this hard - only in Apple's apps - to use active fonts that are on the system.

As this thread has shown, there is more going on under the surface than many people, sometimes even people involved, realize at first. At one point I even got dragged into the Adobe forums. The Adobe employee in the forums didn't seem to acknowledge there was any problem at all. I generally don't have a problem with Apple's approach and design, but then Apple invariably muddies the waters themselves. That "availableFonts" method returns all of those problematic fonts. I have no problem with Apple making the fonts part of the inviolate operating system, but then, even in Big Sur, Apple has no problem installing fonts into /Library/Fonts, where they could be modified using more traditional methods. It shouldn't be this hard. Adobe doesn't care about Mac users, and Apple doesn't care much more either. iOS definitely the favourite child.

I generally don't have a problem with Apple's approach and design…

And actually, I wouldn't either if I were in the 90% or more group of users who never, ever need to see these fonts, and don't care if they ever do. If you're an English user (for this example), who cares if you can't see Athelas and many other OS installed fonts? Most users do everything in Arial, Helvetica or Times for their personal letters and other documents.

Adobe doesn't care about Mac users, and Apple doesn't care much more either. iOS definitely the favourite child.

Those are very true statements. Adobe seems to tolerate Mac users, at best. They sell far more of their software for Windows systems. And you almost have to wonder sometimes how long Apple will cater to desktop users. I hope it's a very long time since an iPad is not a desktop device, and I don't want to go back to Windows if I don't have to.

Now, this may sound backwards coming out of me, but get this. We're getting close to retirement (another year or a bit more) and are looking into ways of eliminating a lot of costs. One is no more $100 per year Office 365 payments. That has been set to die without renewing in November. Neither of us likes Apple's Mail app, but we found a great, free replacement that looks and behaves almost exactly like Outlook in eM Client. Couldn't stand LibreOffice and all other Office replacements were web based only (never, ever will our personal data sit on someone else's remote server). We didn't even consider Apple's very weak substitutes of Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Instead we spent the current $30 sale price for SoftMaker Office 2021.

Yes, there is a point to all of the this. 🙂

In the SoftMaker Office suite, you can control every single font macOS installs. That is, you can hide any of them you want, or all of them. Including those in the Fonts folder, not just Supplemental. This is the preference fonts pane for TextMaker (the Word substitute).

You can either selectively turn them off (and I of course turned off all of the Noto fonts), or click Hide all. If you do that and have no third party fonts active, your font list will be blank, if you want it to be. Though it does use its own embedded copy of Calibri as the default font.

But here's the main part. Doing this once affects all three of the apps. You don't have to open PlanMaker and Presentations to do the same thing separately to each one.

This is the common complaint I've read here and in other forums where users hate the idea of having to control which OS fonts you see one - app - at - a - time. If Adobe and Microsoft built in the same control as SoftMakerOffice, this would make life much simpler for everyone. Set the OS fonts you want to be visible ONCE in (example) Photoshop, and all of the other Adobe apps automatically follow. Same thing with MS Office. Or the any other suite you can name.

There are some third-party apps that can disable many (but not all) fonts that Font Book cannot disable.

Josdn-t wrote:

Assuming all of us are using only (or very mostly) English, I cannot understand why we have to suffer the existence of those

Because Apple has customers all over the world. English speakers are the minority.

I am working with Adobe and CorelDRAW graphic softwares on both Mac and Windows, I note, and am advised in several forums that the big quantity of fonts is the main culprit in slowing down our computer.

That is false. The number of installed fonts has nothing to do with the speed of your computer.

There are 521 font sets (which include regular, bold, italic, bold italic, ...) in my iMac, but unfortunately 169 of them are useless (I told you as "non-favourable") to me since they are Arabian, Hebrew, Thai, Cambodian,Japanese, Chinese, and some I cannot recognize the nationality !

The irony here is that Apple already knows that those fonts are probably useless to you. Apple has already designed them so that they won't show up in your font lists, but they will be available if you ever did happen to need them. However, many 3rd party apps ignore the language settings and show you all of the installed fonts.

It’s not your individual problem. They are writing their Mac software incorrectly which is causing your problem.

They won’t even try to write it correctly if they don’t hear from their customers.

Even then, they will probably ignore you because you are still sending them exorbitant amounts of money for poorly written software that causes you difficulty.

Ask the developer of the software that you use fonts in to write their app to correctly access the Fonts instead of just loading everything they can find stored on disk.

They are writing their Mac software incorrectly which is causing your problem.

I am really tired of you posting this misleading, and false nonsense.

No, third party apps DO NOT load everything they can find on the disk. They load the fonts that are ENABLED. Just as they should, and have for DECADES.

Apple is the only vendor doing it wrong by preventing you from controlling the fonts you do, or do not need to see or use.

Proof? I've mentioned it in various other topics like this that you intentionally ignore. Go ahead, open Pages or any other app written by Apple and just try to use an active font Apple hides from you. A font you may be required to use in order to complete a client's project.

An attempt at humor, I'm guessing.

But, no. Any of the fonts Apple won't let you see if it doesn't match your region.

There's a user on this forum who wondered where Athelas went. They'd been using it as their corporate font for years. All was fine until someone at Apple decided you shouldn't see particular fonts. Then they couldn't get at it in Pages. Why? What's the logic - if any - in this?

This is why we have font managers; so you can disable fonts you don't need to see on a regular basis, but are available if you need to momentarily turn them back on. The user certainly shouldn't have to keep switching languages in order to access a font they need.

My humor was based on a post several months ago where those in the U.S. could not see an Apple Symbol font in Pages until adding one or the other mentioned preferred languages. Once that was done, the Apple Symbol font appeared in the Pages font menu.