Panther Font Book

[BillS]

Can those using Font Book explain their procedures? I love its simplicity and speed, but have not found a convenient way to use it. The weakest link seems to be font removal. When done with a job, I want to remove the fonts from the workstation entirely (not just deactivate them). Otherwise, I'd wind up with thousands and thousands of fonts and a confusing mess.

Font Book lets you delete fonts, but does not seem to let you do so for an entire font set at a time. Deleting a set only deletes the references to the set, not the fonts themselves (similar to the way iTunes playlists work). To delete the actual fonts it seems that you must select all the fonts individually in Font Book and delete them. That's very awkward, since you have to be careful not to delete all the fonts you want to keep.

Am I missing something?

Bill Schwartz
Professional Productions

[almaink]

I use it and here is how,
In FB preferences I set to copy fonts "for my use only". That copies the fonts to yourlibrary/fonts. To remove, select the font(s) and go to file/remove font. That will move it to the trash. Empty trash and you are done. It works great for customer fonts on disks because you can copy from the disk to FB and if you save the customers files just move the removed fonts from the trash to the customers folder. I have all my personal fonts in one alphabetized folder on the root of my hard drive and when I need a font I select it from the folder using FB and it copies to MU/fonts and when done to the trash.

[BillS]

Good idea, almaink! But I find that "Remove Font" only deletes Postscript *screen* fonts from User/Library/Fonts and leaves all the Postscript *outline* fonts behind. dfonts seem to get deleted just fine. Do you find this, too? (I've already tried deleting the FontBook plist file and all the collections but this odd behavior persists.)

[almaink]

No, both screen and printer go to trash on all my Macs. Could be a permission issue. Check permissions on the printer fonts and see who "owns" them.

[BillS]

I do own those printer fonts and can delete them in the Finder or in Terminal without entering my administrator password. So that can't be it. Very strange. I'm in 10.3.4. What OS version are you running?

[almaink]

10.3.5. But FB worked since I installed 10.3. and for all point updates.

[BillS]

After more testing it appears that the problem was with the particular customer-supplied fonts I happened to choose for initial testing. Other fonts seem to delete just fine. Odd, since I can find nothing wrong with the fonts I first tried. I will just keep an eye on ~/Library/Fonts to make sure nothing is piling up in case other fonts show the same problem.

I am starting to like Font Book using your method of reserving User/Library/Fonts for temporary fonts only. It is simple and fast. And the "Resolve Duplicates" seems to work OK despite warnings I've read about it.

How exactly do you handle customer-supplied Helvetica or Helvetica Neue, which you probably already have in your system as dfonts? Do you manually disable the dfonts before activating the ps versoinis? Or do you use the "Resolve Duplicates" and let Font Book do the work? Have you had problems with Mail, Safari, etc. when you temporarily disable the critical dftonts? (I cannot believe that Steve Jobs still hasn't fixed this ridiculous OS X problem by simply using obscure fonts for Apple apps instead of the most common ones.)

[almaink]

Yes I disable any duplicate fonts before I open the customers versions and I haven't had any problems with any apps with the exception of Quark 6.1 but any problems with Quark fonts can be resolved by converting the problem font with Fontographer. I agree you would think Apple would have given fonts and the management of fonts top priority since graphics are a Mac mainstay.

[BillS]

Thanks a lot, almaink. Your Font Book workflow seems very good and I will be trying it for everything going forward. It would be great to ditch FontReserve, which has been nothing but trouble due to constant database corruption.