Section 8.5. Fontsand Font Book | Switching to the Mac[c] The Missing Manual

8.5. Fontsand Font Book

Mac OS X type always looks smooth onscreen, no matter what the point size , and always looks smooth in printouts, no matter what kind of printer you use. (That's because Mac OS X accepts only always-smooth type formats like TrueType, PostScript Type 1, and OpenType.)

To help you keep its fonts organized, Mac OS X comes with a program that's just for installing, removing, inspecting, and organizing fonts. It's called Font Book (Figure 8-9), and it's waiting in your Applications folder.

8.5.1. Where Fonts Live

If you're used to Windows, one of the most confusing changes is that there is no longer one single Fonts folder for your computer. There are now five Fonts folders.

The fonts you actually see listed in the Font menus and panels of your programs are combinations of these Fonts folders' contents. They include:

Your private fonts (your Home folder Library Fonts) . Youre free to add your own custom fonts to this folder. Go wildit's your font collection and yours alone. Nobody else who uses the Mac will be able to use these fonts, and nobody will even know that you have them.

Figure 8-9. Each account holder can have a separate set of fonts; your set is represented by the User icon. You can drag fonts and font families between the various Fonts folders herefrom your User account folder to the Computer icon, for exampleto make them available to all account holders.

Main font collection (Library Fonts) . This, for all intents and purposes, is the equivalent of the traditional Fonts folder. Any fonts in this folder are available to everyone to use in every program. (As with most features that affect everybody who shares your Macintosh, however, only people with Administrator accounts are allowed to change the contents of this folder.)
Network fonts (Network Library Fonts) . In certain corporations, a network administrator may have set up a central font collection on another computer on the network, to which your Mac and others can "subscribe." The beauty of this system, of course, is that everybody on the network will be able to rely on a consistent set of fonts.
Essential system fonts (System Library Fonts) . This folder contains the fonts that the Mac itself needs: the typefaces you see in your menus, dialog boxes, icons, and so on. You can open this folder to see these font suitcases, but you can't do anything with them, such as opening, moving, or adding to them.
Classic fonts (Mac OS 9 System Folder Fonts) . Mac OS X automatically notices and incorporates any fonts in the System Folder that youve designated for use by the Classic environment (Section 4.9.2.2). This folder is also, of course, the source of fonts that appear in the Font menus of your Classic programs (Section 4.8).

With the exception of essential system fonts, you'll find an icon representing each of these locations in your Font Book program, described next .

8.5.2. Font Book: Installing and Managing Fonts

One of the biggest perks of Mac OS X is its preinstalled collection of over 50 great-looking fonts"over $1,000 worth," according to Apple, which licensed them from type companies. Font Book is your ticket to making the most of them.

8.5.2.1. Looking over your fonts

Right off the bat, Font Book is great for one enjoyable pursuit: looking at samples of each typeface. Click Computer, for example; click the first font name , and then press the down-arrow key. As you walk down the list, the rightmost pane shows you a sample of each font (Figure 8-9).

You can also open any font family's flippy triangle (or highlight its name and then press the right arrow) to see the font variations it includes: Italic, Bold, and so on.

Tip: Don't miss the Preview menu, which lets you substitute a full display of every character in the rightmost pane (choose Repertoire)or, if you choose Custom, substitute your own text.

8.5.2.2. Eliminating duplicates

Since your Mac accesses up to five folders containing fonts, you might wonder what happens in the case of conflicts . For example, suppose you have two slightly different fonts, both called Optima, which came from different type companies, and are housed in different Fonts folders on your system. Which font do you actually get when you use it in your documents?

The scheme is actually fairly simple: Mac OS X proceeds down the list of Fonts folders in the order described on the facing page, beginning with your own home Fonts folder. It only acknowledges the existence of the first instance of the font it finds.

Tip: If you'd rather have more control, open Font Book. A bullet () next to a font's name is Font Book's charming way of telling you that you've got copies of the same font in more than one place. Click the one that you want to keep and then choose Edit

Resolve Duplicates.

[your hard drive]

Windows (or WINNT)

Fonts folder.

Windows 95, 98 . Choose Start Settings Control Panel Fonts.

Copy the font files, using any of the techniques described in Chapter 5, onto your Mac. Then, when you double-click a font's file in the Finder, Font Book opens and presents the typeface for your inspecting pleasure . If you like it, click Install font.

You've just installed it into your account's Fonts folder, so that it appears in the Font menus and panels of all your programs.

8.5.2.4. Removing and hiding fonts

Removing a font from your machine is easy: Highlight it in Font Book and then press the Delete key. (You're asked to confirm the decision.)

Before taking such a drastic step, however, consider this: When you disable a font, you simply hide it from your programs. You might want to disable a font so that you can use a different version of it (a copy from a different company, for example), or to make your Font menus shorter, or to make a program like Microsoft Word start up faster.

To disable a font, just click it and then click the checkbox button beneath the list (or press Shift- -D). Confirm your decision by clicking Disable in the confirmation box.

The font's name now appears gray, and the word Off appears next to it, making it absolutely clear what you've just done. (To turn the font on again, highlight its name and then click the now-empty checkbox button, or press Shift- -D again.)

Note: When you install, remove, disable, or enable a font using Font Book, you see the changes in the Font panels of your Cocoa programs (Section 4.8) immediately. You won't see the changes in open Carbon programs, however, until you quit and reopen them.