I have 272 System fonts active. Is that necessary?

GeeZee52 wrote:

Do they really need to be active?

Not if you're not going to use them. I wouldn't remove them however.

You're welcome. I meant you don't have to activate any that aren't already activated. I don't use Suitcase but I would leave well enough alone. I have almost 500 fonts fwiw.

You're welcome.

All fonts are "active" (doing nothing). The System El Capitan uses only one for itself (SanFransisco, not available for others)

Do not delete fonts: saves nothing in cpu cycles nor space, and may harm the system.

The same for languages: never delete any.

Yes, you can safely remove the majority of them. All active fonts take up RAM. The less fonts that are active, the more RAM that is available for other uses.

See my article, Font Management in OS X, to find which fonts can be removed for each major release of OS X (since 10.3).

I practice what I preach. The lists you see are all I ever have permanently active. Many folks are unaware that there is a darn good reason for doing this, depending on your line of work. I do prepress work all day. The less fonts I have open, the better. Especially OS supplied fonts that would conflict with customer supplied Type 1 PostScript or other font versions that must be used with a project.

I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

If you do pre-press work or something related, you may want to heed Kurt's advice. I don't mind having them around in case I go to a site that uses one or I just feel like playing with a font.

I don't mind having them around in case I go to a site that uses one or I just feel like playing with a font.

Agreed. The whole point of the article (or at least the minimum font lists) is intended for folks who actually need to do that. Otherwise, I'd say just leave everything OS X installs. Though there are some I would still remove. Like all of the Braille fonts and any Kanji fonts (other than PingFang). They're all fonts I can neither read or have the slightest use for, so why have them on the drive?

There are also lots of them in the the /Library/Fonts/ folder that exist for foreign language support. English is the only language I can read, so that again is a lot of fonts that are totally useless to me. As are the very large set of STIXxxx.otf fonts. These are all (mostly) math symbols.

Believe it or not, I have used the Braille font to create a design. I also go to Japanese sites on occasion. But that's just me. 😎

I neither read nor understand either btw. I just like how they look. 😀

On the other hand, I have the SF fonts installed so I can use them in other programs. Shhhh… don't tell. 😮

I would not remove fonts (as I said): the more fonts you remove, the ofter you will get a notification that "the ...font is not on your system, it is replaced by ..... "

which makes a file less readable and/or not readable as it was meant.

Not to argue, but using the minimum font lists in my article, I have never once seen that message.

As I noted, the lists are meant for those who have a need to get their systems down to only the necessary fonts, not everyone. I also have all of the fonts installed by OS X set aside on another drive. If something did come up where I had to activate a missing font, I can activate them like any other font with my font manager.

I agree with you Kurt, one, I've never seen the message either, and two, there are very good reasons to reduce fonts. I didn't read the entire article BTW but it makes perfect sense.

Hi Kurt, I have that regularly when receiving files from other systems (exemplo gratia Windows), and I even have never removed any fonts....

Lex

That's because you don't have the Microsoft Core Fonts installed.