Font Book Issues and Font Processes Slowing Down The Computer

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Level 1

4 points

Font Book Issues and Font Processes Slowing Down The Computer

Hello,

We are having an issue which is affecting our fleet of around 80 M3 Macbook Airs and potentially more as we are purchasing 140 more in the summer.

I have included photos of the errors I am experiencing. This has to do with fonts and font management on the machines.

The first issue we encountered is that any fonts that were installed afterwards would end up not showing up in Font Book. I read that this has been an ongoing issue since Monterey. We are on Sonoma and I have tried flushing the cache using:

atsutil databases -removeUser

as well as deleteing com.apple.FontRegistry.user.plist in the users/library/preferences folder

After deleting those files and emptying the trash, I would reset the fontbook, kill the font process and restart the computer to let the cache rebuild.

After the first few restarts, we would see the Font database populate. But soon after, Font Book would go down to 178 fonts installed and not list the new fonts anymore.

So I dug deeper and found that in activity monitor, whenever the fonts would dwindle down to 178 fonts, the fontworker and fontd processes would be working over drive and using almost 100% of system resources.

I went into console to capture log files and this is what I found:

There are a large number of fontd errors that say “Can not save bookmark for the ‘file:///System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Fontservices.framework/Resources/Fonts/ApplicationSupport/fontname.ttf’

The constant flood of these errors are slowing down the computer. These appear to all be in System folders that we have no access to.

Anyone with ideas on how to fix these issues?

MacBook Air (M3, 2024)

Posted on May 21, 2024 9:59 AM

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Answer 1

Kurt Lang

Level 9

59,172 points

May 21, 2024 12:58 PM in response to freddyrux

All fonts installed by the OS cannot be touched in any way. Not only can they not be deleted from the System folder, since Ventura, you can't even disable most of them. This is also true for any third party font manager that will show all of these fonts. Some will go through the motions of saying they are disabling the System fonts, but nothing actually happens. They're still active.

Font Book does not show all of the OS installed fonts. This is normal. Since El Capitan, Apple started having all of their apps show fonts that are only meant for your language/region. All others are hidden. At least, they're hidden in apps that use Apple's APIs to mimic the same fonts lists Apple's apps do. Such as the MS Office and Affinity apps. Adobe has so far chosen to pay no attention to this separation and shows every active font on the system.

There are a good number of system installed fonts you can remove, and the only way to do it is through Font Book.

Disabling certain fonts in Sonoma: There are 228 fonts (as 67 families) in the /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_Font7/ folder. Whether or not you have them seems to be related to a hardware difference. These fonts were present on my M2 Pro mini, but not our older 2018 Intel mini, even though they’re running the same version of Sonoma, and both had Sonoma installed from scratch on an erased volume.

Open Font Book (it's the only way to view and manage these fonts). Click All Fonts at the top left. The rest is easier if you put the fonts into list view. As I never use Font Book for font management, all fonts listed belonged to the OS. Then I just started at the top and right clicked on anything with bold (enabled) text to see if it would let me choose Deactivate. You can turn off a lot of mostly Asian fonts this way.

When done, the folder was then empty, and 1.08 GB of space was reclaimed. So, the OS didn't just disable the fonts, but deleted them from the System folder (it's good to be the OS and do things the user can't). Everything I disabled now says Download in Font Book when I right click on them.

Any time you apply an OS update, it will put all of these fonts back on the drive, and you have to go through the whole process again to remove them.

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