I installed some fonts and now have 1148 installed, many of which I wish to remove. However, Font Book 3.0 freezes on loading so I am unable to proceed. Your assistance is much appreciated. I am running OSX 10.7.4.
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
1) Don't try to launch Font Book.
2) By default, the fonts you added should have gone to the Fonts folder in your user account. Remove all, or as many as you wish.
3) Restart your Mac and immediately hold down the Shift key when you hear the startup chime to boot into Safe Mode. Keep holding the Shift key until OS X asks you to log in (you will get this screen on a Safe Mode boot even if your Mac is set to automatically log in). Let the Mac finish booting to the desktop and then restart normally. This will clear Font Book's database and the cache files of the user account you logged into in Safe Mode.
4) Launch Font Book. It will now build a new database based on the fonts remaining in the /System/Library/Fonts/ folder, the /Library/Fonts/ folder, and the Fonts folder of your user account.
Kurt,
This is helpful and I will procedd with your recommendation, with one caveat. In 10.7.4, I don't have a Fonts folder inside my User folder. This is all that is listed: Applications, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Movies, Music, Pictures, Public, Sites, Stuffit. I have checked each folder without further luck. I'm not sure how to proceed from here...
PJ
Sorry, forgot that Lion hides the user Preferences folder. From the desktop, hold down the Option key and up in the menu bar, choose Go > Library to open the Library folder of your user account.
Marvelous! Thank you, I'll report back on my progress.
Kurt,
Following your excellent instructions I discovered I had 3048 fonts in my User Font folder. I tossed a thousand of them bringing the talley to just over 2,000. After Safe Boot and a restart, Font Book still hangs. I'm wondering if it just needs lots of time to rebuild or if I need to ditch the pref file.....?
That's generally too many fonts for Font Book to handle. It's intended to be a light use font manager for the average user.
That, and the fact that it hung again while building a new database is a very sure sign that at least one of the fonts is damaged badly enough to make FB croak. When that happens, its database is damaged again, and the only way to fix it is to start over with the instructions above.
Make a folder on your desktop and move all of the fonts out of your user account into that folder. Then repeat the above steps. With what should only be the fonts installed by the system on your hard drive left, Font Book should then finish loading successfully.
Are those all, or most of them, free fonts? If so, free fonts are the number one cause of headaches like this. They're free because that's all they're worth. Not that there aren't some well built free fonts out there, but they are in the serious minority.
Figuring out which of those you have are junk involves adding a block of them at a time to Font Book and seeing if it dies. If it does, you know at least one font in that last group is no good.
You could also purchase a better font manager and ditch Font Book. I recommend either Suitcase Fusion 4, or FontExplorer X Pro. Both have built in font checking and will flag bad ones. I know Font Book does too, but it's not nearly as good. With SF4 or FEX Pro, you can check the fonts before adding or activating them.
Kurt, FYI I gave FB some time to think things over and it did recover enough to indicate residual life:)
Yes, installing some new 'free' fonts for a client seems to be causing the outstanding issue, otherwise I have no others in my system and it has been working just fine for years.
Time for me to update my oldere version of Suitcase. And yes, FB is a pain in that it says Preview but in fact installs the fonts anyway.....this is how I got into this tailspin to begin with.
Your professional assistance is much appreciated! It has me curious to ask what you do for a living, if you're willing to answer.
PJ
It has me curious to ask what you do for a living, if you're willing to answer.
No problem. 🙂 I run a small business out of my home doing mostly prepress work. I started in prints shops out of trade school (yikes!) 35 years ago running a small press. Hated working in press or bindery. Got a job in prepress making plates for the presses. Then the industry did a major flip in how things where done when Scitex Imager and He** (don't blame me, that was the guy's name) Chomacom imaging equipment hit the printing industry. There we were, doing digital color and retouching at the very forefront of the field. The machines cost close to $1,000,000 per station (not a typo). They'd been in use a couple of years before I finally got into that end; roughly seven years before there was such a thing as Photoshop 1.0.
Somewhere in there, desktop publishing with Aldus Pagemaker and Quark XPress pretty much eliminated paste up and cameras. Drum scanners eliminated doing separations on a camera (think of them kind of as a bellows camera, but at least 50 times larger). So on top of doing color work on these proprietary stations, we all started learning to use and handle the fonts that went with this new way of doing page layout.
Been doing that ever since, but mostly work in Photoshop.
Kurt,
Nice to hear some (historic!) details. Reminds me of my first graphics cut & paste / letraset efforts in college (1977). I never looked back with my first version of PageMaker, absolutely loved it. Same with Photoshop etc.
I loved doing rostrum camera work and actually miss that part of the business. Scanning is very nice, but shooting and printing was exhilarating, though time consuming. But there was a different pace to life in those days, and different expectations.
And for all the advances in the digital workplace we have also managed to drag so many issues along with every revision. I really wish software design could advance to the stage where it's less of a profit based business and more of a service. I don't get the concept of annual updates just because they have to feed the whale. I understand it, I just don't 'get' it.
Ray Bradbury, recently passed, refers to the so called 'communication age' as a flim flam, and to a significant extent I agree. Still, we are moving forward in so many ways. Nice to share with you and I am very grateful for your support on my above issue.
Where are you located?
PJ
Where are you located?
I am in White Bear Lake, MN. A northern suburb of St. Paul. Blatant self advertisement follows: 😉
Font Book 3.0 in OSX 10.7.4
