Managing Fonts in Mac OS X

You may never need to manage your fonts, especially if you use only a modest number of fonts. Most users use the 100 fonts included with Mac OS X 10.3 and never need more, and these fonts are, by default, always available.

But many users need a font manager, because they may use a larger amount of fonts, need to activate and deactivate them as they work, and group them into collections. Graphic design and production pros especially depend upon these capabilities.

For Mac OS 9, several third-party font manager utilities are available, including Adobe Type Manager Deluxe, Extensis Suitcase, Extensis Font Reserve, Insider Software’s Font Agent, and Alsoft’s MasterJuggler. Each of these utilities has its loyal fans, and each now has a version that works with Mac OS X.

Before Mac OS X 10.3, users were pretty much constrained to these third-party solutions as they slowly became available. It is possible in Mac OS X 10.2 to manage fonts by dragging them in and out of the fonts folders, creating subfolders, for example, to organize them by job or name, but this is really only feasible for relatively small font libraries or occasional use. Some applications such as TextEdit make use of Mac OS X’s Font panel, which lets you change font sizes and group fonts into set-like collections, but it can’t enable or disable collections, which is necessary when you have a large number of fonts.

This section describes the font management software included with Mac OS X 10.3.

Font Book

Mac OS X 10.3 includes a new application called Font Book. Font Book is not a full-fledged font manager, but it is close enough for most users who are not graphic design professionals.

With Font Book, you can accomplish the following tasks:

• Install fonts to your Home fonts folder or the Main fonts folder.

• Preview fonts.

• Turn a font on or off.

• Create, edit, and manage font collections.

• Turn font collections on or off.

• Detect and resolve duplicate fonts.

• Search for installed fonts in collections and in the six font locations.

Open Font Book by double-clicking its icon in the Applications folder. Figure 12-5 shows the Font Book window as it looks when you open it for the first time. The following sections describe how you use FontBook.

Figure 12-5: Font Book’s interface, showing the Sample style of font preview.

Font Book and the Font panel

When you make changes in Font Book, you can see some of them reflected in the font menus of applications. An easy way to check the changes is to look in the previously me ntioned Mac OS X Font panel. Certain changes will only show up in the Font panel, such as changes in the Collection column.

The best way to call up the Font panel is to launch TextEdit and navigate the menu by choosing Format Font Show Fonts. The Font panel is more fully described later in this Chapter.

Working with Font Book

In Font Book, the terms on and enabled are synonymous, as are off and disabled. On or enabled mean that the fonts appear in the Font menus of applications and appear in the Font panel. Off or disabled mean that the fonts will not appear in the Font menus of applications or in the Font panel.

When using Font Book, all properly installed fonts in Mac OS X actually remain available for use. What Font Book does is analogous to hiding them or showing them! This concept is very different from the concepts of activation and deactivation, long used by the third-party font manager utilities, where fonts are made available or unavailable for use, as if they had been uninstalled or reinstalled. Nevertheless, in Font Book you cannot use fonts that you cannot see.

Changes you make in Font Book stick after you quit. All the fonts stay in their enabled or disabled states until you launch Font Book again to make more changes. Font Book cannot perform the helpful and sometimes critical autoactivation of fonts as an application calls for them, a key feature of the third-party font manager utilities.

Font Book Preferences

You open the Font Book Preferences pane, shown in Figure 12-6, by choosing Font Book Preferences.

Figure 12-6: Font Book’s Preferences pane.

Under Installing fonts makes them available: you have three choices — for me only, for all users of this computer, and for Classic Mac OS. Use this preference setting to determine the location the fonts are installed to. Note that the last choice is an easy way to install to the Fonts folder in the Mac OS 9 system used for Classic.

Under Disabling a collection turns off: you can choose just the collection or all fonts in the collection. If you choose to turn off just the collection, the fonts it contains remain enabled. The other choice turns the fonts contained in the disabled collection off, and these fonts will appear dimmed in all the other collections containing them.

At the bottom is a checkbox, Always copy font files when installing. If this is unchecked, as it is by default, the fonts will be moved, not copied, whenever possible. It is not possible to move fonts off of a CD or from a folder you have read-only access to.

Installing new fonts

To install new fonts to your system using Font Book, follow these steps:

1. Copy the new fonts to your hard disk or insert the disc that contains the new fonts.

2. In the Finder, double-click on the font’s icon. Font Book opens and displays the font.

3. Click the Install Font button. The font is installed by default to the logged-in user’s Home fonts folder at /Users/username/Library/Fonts. The font is available only to this user. Where the font is installed can be changed in the Font Book Preference pane. You do not have to quit Font Book for the changes to occur.

To make the font available to all users of the computer, drag it to the Computer folder in Font Book’s Collection column. The font is installed to the Main fonts folder at /Library/Fonts. You must have administrator privileges to do this.

After it is installed, the font appears in the Font panel and in the list of available fonts in your applications.

Previewing fonts

To preview any font and all of its glyphs in Font Book, follow these steps:

1. Open Font Book.

2. In the Collection column, select a collection.

3. In the Font column, select the font family you want to preview.

4. Click the disclosure triangle next to the font family name to reveal which typefaces are available.

5. Select a typeface. All the characters available in that typeface appear in the preview area. Hold the cursor over any of them to see more information appear in a yellow box, including the full font file name, the font’s type, the version number of the font, and its location in path form.

6. Select a font size by using the Size pop-up menu, or choose Fit from the menu to fit the preview into the area. You can also drag the font size slider on the right side of the preview area.

Choose from the following additional options in the Preview menu:

• Sample (the default): Shows font’s the alphabet in upper- and lowercase with the ten digits.

• Repertoire: Shows the entire glyph set for the font, as shown in Figure 12-7.

  
  Figure 12-7: Font Book’s preview feature set to Repertoire, showing part of the complete glyph set for Lucinda Grande Regular.

• Custom: Allows you to type what you wish into the preview area.

• Show or Hide Preview: Hides or shows the preview area.

• Show or Hide Font Info: Adds an information area to the bottom of the Preview area. Information includes Font type, Foundry, Copyright year, Family, Display name, and PostScript Name.

Turning a font on or off

In Font Book, turning on a font makes it appear in the Font panel or in an application’s list of available fonts. Turning off a font makes it disappear from the Font panel or from an application’s list of available fonts.

To turn a font on or off, follow these steps:

1. Open Font Book.

2. In the Collection column, select a collection.

3. In the Font column, select the font family that you want to turn off or on.

   • To turn a font on, click the Enable button and then click the Enable button again in the sheet that appears. In the Font window, you can see that the font name is undimmed and is no longer marked Off.

   • To turn a font off, click the Disable button and then Disable again in the sheet that appears, as shown in Figure 12-8. In the Font column, you see that the font name is dimmed and marked Off.

     
     Figure 12-8: Clicking on the Font column’s Disable button (at bottom) causes this sheet to appear; clicking the Disable button will disable the selected font, Helvetica Neue Regular.

Creating, editing, and managing font collections

Use font collections to gather the fonts you need for particular projects. Follow these steps to create and/or add fonts to a collection:

1. Open Font Book.

2. Click the plus sign button at the bottom of the Collection column. A collection appears in the Collection column named New-0 (or another number if there are other new collections). This step is illustrated in Figure 12-9.

   
   Figure 12-9: Clicking the plus sign button at the bottom of Font Book’s Collection column creates a new collection, which can be renamed from New-x to any name you wish, here OS X Bible.

3. Type a name for the new collection.

4. In the Collection column, click the disclosure triangle next to All Fonts to reveal User and Computer.

5. Click User to see fonts from your Home fonts folder listed in the Font column; or click Computer to see fonts from your Main fonts folder.

6. Drag the fonts you want from the Font column to the new collection.

You can add fonts in a similar way to any of the default collections. The fonts in all collections except User are available to all users of the computer; fonts in the User collection are available only to the logged-in user.

If you have Mac OS 9 installed to run Classic applications, or if you access fonts from the Network location, the fonts in these locations will appear in the Computer collection. The fonts in the System and Main locations also appear there. The only fonts that do not appear in the Computer collection are those in the User collection.

To remove fonts from a collection:

1. Select the collection in the Collection column.

2. Select the fonts you want to remove in the Fonts column.

3. Press the Delete key on the keyboard and then the Remove button on the sheet that appears, shown in Figure 12-10. The font disappears from the Fonts column.

   
   Figure 12-10: Fonts to be removed from a collection have been selected, the delete key pressed, and this sheet appears. Press the Remove button to complete the process.

To delete a collection:

1. In the Collection column, select the collection you want to delete.

2. Press the delete key on the keyboard and then the Remove button on the sheet that appears. The collection disappears from the Collections column.

Turning a font collection on or off

Turning a font collection on makes it appear in the Font panel. Turning it off makes it disappear from the Font panel. Here’s how:

• To turn a font collection on or off, open Font Book and then select a collection from the Collection column.

• Turn the collection on by selecting all the fonts that the collection contains in the Font column. Then, click the Enable button at the bottom of the Font column.

• To turn the selected collection off, click the Disable button at the bottom of the Collection column. Then click Disable again in the sheet that appears.

Detecting and resolving duplicate fonts

Duplicate copies of installed fonts detected by Font Book are marked with a square bullet to the right of the font family name in the Fonts column, as shown in Figure 12-11.

Figure 12-11: Here, the font Comic Sans MS is marked with a bullet to its right as having one or more duplicates. The Resolve Duplicates command straightens out the problem.

To resolve duplicate fonts:

1. Select the version of the font family that you wish to use.

2. Choose Edit Resolve Duplicates. The selected version of the font is turned on, and the other version(s) are turned off.

Searching for fonts

The Font Book window’s search field works in a similar way to the one in every Finder window.

First, select the collection or font family you want to search in and then type the name (such as Arial) or part of the name (such as italic) in the search field in the upper right of the Font Book window.

As you type each letter, the search results appear almost instantly in the Font column. Fonts that match your entry appear under their family name for easy identification, as shown in Figure 12-12.

Figure 12-12: Entering the word italic into the Search field at the top-right of the Font Book window causes the selected collection (here, All Fonts) to be searched for fonts that match, and the results displayed in the Font column. Note that every font listed is an italic.

The Font panel

The Font panel has been a feature of Mac OS X from its first version. Apple includes it as a helpful feature that software developers, if they wish, can include in their programs. Many applications use their own way of working with fonts, and do not use the Font panel. Font Book is really a development of the Font panel, and they have similar interfaces. The redesigned Font panel of Mac OS X 10.3 is shown in Figure 12-13.

Figure 12-13: Mac OS X 10.3’s Font panel. The Action pop-up menu is shown at the bottom.

To see the Font panel, launch TextEdit and navigate the menu to Format Font Show Fonts. The Font panel can be accessed in a similar way in other applications that use it. You will not find the Font panel in the Application or Utilities folder, because it is a system-level facility that can only be accessed from inside a compatible, usually Cocoa, application.

The Font panel and Font Book interoperate to some degree — certain changes made in one are almost instantly reflected in the other. For example, if you create a collection in the Font panel, the new collection will appear in Font Book, and vice versa.

The Font panel can do many things that Font Book cannot, but it lacks Font Book’s font management features.

With the Font panel, you can accomplish the following:

• View collections, families, typefaces, and sizes of fonts.

• Preview fonts in their font family name.

• Set font sizes.

• Create font collections and add fonts to them, including a Favorites collection.

• View recently used fonts.

• Add various visual effects to selected fonts.

• Add color to document backgrounds.

• Turn common font ligatures on or off, as shown in Figure 12-14.

• Adjust space between fonts.

• Adjust the font baseline.

• Search for fonts.

• Open Font Book.

  
  Figure 12-14: The Typography dialog, summoned from Font panel’s Action menu, provides an easy way to control ligatures, tracking, and to shift the text baseline to a higher position.

The Character Palette

The Character Palette is a Mac OS X feature that you use to enter special characters, such as various symbols and dingbats, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese characters, and characters from other languages. The Character Palette is shown in Figure 12-15.

Figure 12-15: The Character Palette, set to view Roman characters and symbols by Category, with the Miscellaneous category selected and displayed.

Like the Font panel, the Character Palette is not an application or utility, but a system-level facility. Like the Font panel, it can only be opened from applications that support it. If you need to enter a special character in an application that does not support Character Palette, open it in TextEdit, enter the character into a TextEdit document, then cut and paste the character into your application’s document.

In Mac OS X 10.3, the Character Palette is on by default, and can be turned on or off in the International System Preference’s Input menu subpane.

To open Character Palette in Mac OS X 10.3, click its icon, usually a flag or a distinctive character (letter) in the menu bar. This is the Input menu, shown in Figure 12-16. From the Input menu, choose Show Character Palette. To open Character Palette in TextEdit or Font Book, or in most Cocoa applications, navigate the menus to Edit Special Characters.

Figure 12-16: The Input Menu can be turned on or off, and have its contents selected, from the International Preference pane. Here two items have been selected, Show Character Palette and Show Keyboard Viewer.

To enter a special character or symbol with Character Palette:

1. Place the insertion point in your document where you want to enter the character or symbol.

2. Open the Character Palette.

3. From the View pop-up menu at the top of the Character Palette window, choose the type of characters you want to enter. (If you don’t see the View pop-up menu, click the clear oval button in the upper-right corner of the window; click it again to hide the menu.)

   The View pop-up menu choices and their subsequent selector-button activated panes (otherwise known as tabs) are described here:

   • Roman allows you to pick characters by 13 categories of symbols, or from Favorites you define.

   • Japanese allows you to pick characters by Radical, by 22 categories of symbols, from 2 Code Tables, or from Favorites you define.

   • Traditional Chinese allows you to pick characters by Radical, by 16 categories of symbols, from 2 Code Tables, or from Favorites you define.

   • Korean allows you to pick characters by Radical, by 18 categories of symbols, or from Favorites you define.

   • Simplified Chinese allows you to pick characters by Radical, by 47 categories of symbols, from 2 Code Tables, or from Favorites you define.

   • Unicode allows you to pick by 122 categories of characters and symbols, from the entire Unicode Table, or from Favorites you define.

   • Glyph allows you to pick from the Glyph Catalog, or from Favorites you define.

4. In the pane of your choice, select the category, radical, or Unicode block in the list column on the left and double-click the character or symbol you want to enter on the right.

   Or if there is no list column in the pane, find and double-click the character or symbol.

5. The double-clicked character or symbol will appear in your document at the insertion point.

   Alternately, you can click the Insert button at the bottom of the window, or simply drag the character to the document window.

   If the current application does not support the character, an alert appears at the bottom of the window.

The Character Palette interface can be expanded by clicking on the Character Info or Font Variation disclosure triangles in the lower-left of the window, as shown in Figure 12-17.

Figure 12-17: The Character Palette with the Character Info and Font Variation disclosure triangles turned down to reveal its extended interface. The Roman numeral seven is selected from the Unicode block Number Forms, revealing its Related Characters and Glyph Variations.

The Character Info area displays a close-up of the selected character or symbol along with any related characters, readings, or other information.

The Font Variation area shows variations of the selected character or symbol in available fonts, whose names appear below the symbol. Select one, and the Insert button changes to Insert with Font; you can click this button, double-click the character or symbol, or drag it to the document to insert it. The Font Variation area also contains a pop-up menu of the current default and user-created collections.

At any time, you can add any selected character or symbol to a Favorites collection that is kept with the View you are in, by clicking the Add to Favorites button. The Favorites list can be accessed by clicking the Favorites selector button (tab) in any of the views.

Using third-party font manager utilities

At the time of writing, these were the third-party font management utilities available for Mac OS X:

• Extensis Suitcase X1, shown in Figures 12-18 and 12-19

  
  Figure 12-18: The Suitcase X1 interface, previewing the fonts in the Project One Set in 18 points, showing the preview style pop-up menu set to ABC 123.

  
  Figure 12-19: This sheet appears in Suitcase X1 when you try to activate a font suitcase that contains fonts in conflict with those in your Mac OS X System Folder. You could use the very helpful Manage System Fonts feature in this situation.

• Extensis Font Reserve (formerly DiamondSoft Font Reserve), shown in Figures 12-20 and 12-21; and Font Reserve Server

  
  Figure 12-20: The Font Reserve Browser with a set, Project A, disclosed to show the fonts it contains; to their left are dots that indicate their activation status.

  
  Figure 12-21: The Font Reserve Browser’s Preview window showing the Apple-Chancery font in a Waterfall-style preview.

• Insider Software FontAgent

• Alsoft MasterJuggler

Notice that Adobe Type Manager Deluxe does not appear on this list. Adobe has announced that it will not be developing a version of ATM for Mac OS X. So if you use ATM Deluxe to manage your fonts in Mac OS 9, you must pick one of these font managers to work with. Some can import you fonts and sets from ATM Deluxe.

Despite the advent of Font Book, many graphic design and production pros will want to use a third-party font management utility with Mac OS X. This is because these professionals must manage hundreds and sometimes thousands of fonts, for which they need industrial-strength features.

Font managers allow you to control your fonts so that only the ones you need are active at any one time. Mac OS 9 crashed if you had too many fonts open; Mac OS X does not crash, but scrolling through a mile long font menu is a poor use of time.

Third-Party Font Manager Utilities

Here are some commonly found features of third-party font manager utilities:

• Store fonts in any user-defined location.

• Import the Mac OS 9 ATM Deluxe font and set database.

• Add fonts and share them by dragging them.

• Preview and compare several fonts side by side, as a single line, three lines in different sizes (waterfall style), paragraph, or the alphabet with numerals.

• Print font specimen sheets and type books of entire font libraries.

• Activate or deactivate fonts by clicking selected fonts, font families, or font sets. (Font sets are similar to Apple’s categories.)

• Automatically activate fonts. (When an application calls for a font, the utility automatically activates it.) This feature is provided for many common graphic design applications via plug-in software. (Business apps do not need plug-ins.)

• Remove nonessential fonts from system font folders.

• Scan for duplicate fonts by particular characteristics, and delete them.

• Automatically check fonts for corruption.

Organizing fonts for a font manager

Because you don’t have to keep fonts in one of the six locations that Mac OS X looks in, you are free to store them in any location, and organize them in any way you wish. You can store them on your local machine, in folders named for clients, jobs, projects, or in alphabetical folders.

If you have a robust network (100 Mbps Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet) you can centralize the fonts on a file server (which can be a Mac running either Mac OS X client or server), mount the server volume on your local machine’s desktop and then point your font manager at the fonts to open them. This way you can reduce administrative time by managing everyone’s fonts at once on the server.

Consider using Font Reserve Server if you need an industrial-strength network font server. This server enables administrators to create sets that all users can access, control which users can load fonts to the server or create and change font sets, and cache the fonts on client machines to cut down on network traffic. You can even manage font access rights in workgroups, so there are never more copies of a font in use than its license permits.

Removing duplicate System fonts

If you use your Mac to prepare files for professional printing, you will likely have installed the commonly used fonts Courier, Helvetica, Symbol, Times, and Zapf Dingbats; maybe you are even using special versions supplied by a client.

However, dfont versions of these fonts are already installed with Mac OS X in the System/Library/Fonts folder. For many users who would never install other versions of these fonts, their inclusion in the OS is a big advantage.

Figure 12-22 shows the location of these fonts.

Figure 12-22: A Mac OS X 10.3 Finder window set to column view, showing the path to the System fonts. The fonts to be optionally removed, as mentioned in this section, are highlighted.

Unfortunately, if other versions are installed, this situation creates the possibility of an accidental font substitution occurring, something that graphics people want to avoid. There can be subtle differences between different versions or formats of fonts with the same name.

For example, the System font Times might be accidentally opened and used to design the document instead of the customer’s requested Times font, and a preflight tool would miss the distinction between the two. Result: The document needs to be laid out all over again.

Or, a client may submit a file to your print shop for printing, without the specially kerned version of Helvetica they used to design the document, and your system uses the System version of Helvetica instead, and nobody notices, resulting in a text reflow that causes the critical last sentence to be cut off in the middle.

Mistakes like these are all too common, and a lot of time and money go down the drain.

But there is a simple remedy: remove the duplicate System fonts.

This was easy to do in Mac OS 9. Graphics and publishing pros would remove most of the fonts installed with Mac OS 9 in the System Folder, leaving only Charcoal, Chicago, Geneva, Monaco, and New York. The system needed these, and they were almost never used in designed documents, so chances of a font conflict were minimized. And any user could simply drag the fonts out of the System Folder; the system did not prevent this.

But in Mac OS X, the fonts in the System/Library/Fonts folder are protected by the system; not even a user with administrator rights can remove them. This is because Mac OS X will become inoperable if a user accidentally removes a vital system font. For instance, the main font used by the Finder, Lucida Grande, must never be removed under any circumstances; if it is, Mac OS X will have to be reinstalled. So, these System fonts are made off limits to the casual user, who can see them but not change them.

The best way to deal with System fonts that duplicate the fonts you would like to use is to use one of the font managers utilities mentioned above to deactivate the System fonts. For instance, Font Reserve has a feature called System Fonts Handler that makes it easy to do just that.

If you are comfortable with Unix commands, you could remove the fonts by using the Terminal utility. You would use the sudo command to temporarily become the root user, in order to get around the rights restriction.

You could log in as the root user and move the fonts. (For a description of how to turn on the root account, see the description of the NetInfo utility in Chapter 6.)

If you use Classic, you can boot from Mac OS 9, which gives the equivalent of root privileges to all files on your system. You could navigate to the System/Library/Fonts folder and remove the fonts.

Here is a technique to remove the System fonts from inside Mac OS X, without a font manager:

1. In the Finder, select the System/Library/Fonts folder.

2. Press Command-I or select Get Info from the File menu. The Fonts Info window opens.

3. Open the Ownership & Permissions area by clicking its disclosure triangle.

4. Click on the Details disclosure triangle and then click the lock icon.

5. In the Owner pop-up menu, change the owner from system to the item just under it with your login name.

You may now remove the fonts from the folder.

Tip

Make sure you save all the fonts you are removing in a safe place, in case you ever need to restore them.

Tip

If you are removing fonts from the System/Library/Fonts folder as described above, and you run Classic, you must also remove the same fonts from the Classic System Folder’s Fonts folder. This is because Mac OS X applications can also see these fonts. The fonts usually removed are Courier, Helvetica, Times, Symbol, and Zapf Dingbats. Make sure the following fonts are left in at all times, because they are needed by Classic applications: Charcoal, Chicago, Geneva, Monaco, and New York.

Tip

Always keep a Helvetica and Helvetica Neue active because some Mac OS X functions require them. These include Mail, iCal, TextEdit, the Sound preference pane, and certain third-party menu bar items. It does not matter what font format the Helveticas belong to; it just matters that one is always available to the system.

Font utilities

Mac OS X 10.3 includes a utility called Keyboard Viewer, which is an improvement on the Key Caps utility included in previous versions of the Mac OS. Key Caps did not understand Unicode, so many of the characters in fine Unicode fonts such as Lucida Grande and Zapfino were inaccessible. Keyboard Viewer supports Unicode fonts. Figure 12-23 shows the Keyboard Viewer interface.

Figure 12-23: The Mac OS X Keyboard Viewer, doing something the previous utility Key Caps could never do: showing the lowercase characters of the Unicode font Zapfino on the keys.

Keyboard Viewer can be turned on in the Input pane of International preferences.

To use Keyboard Viewer, choose Show Keyboard Viewer from the Input menu in the menu bar. Pick a font family from the pop-up menu and its typeface style from the submenu. The glyphs of the font now appear on the keys they are assigned to. By holding down the Shift, Option, Option-shift, or function keys, you can see how the glyphs change, and learn how to type the glyphs you want. You can also click with your cursor on any key in the Keyboard Viewer window, and that glyph will appear at the insertion point in your document.

Many useful commercial, shareware, and freeware font utilities are available. They tend to fall into the following categories:

• Key Caps–style viewers let you view the glyphs corresponding to the keys.

• Waterfall–style viewers display fonts in text samples, sometimes for multiple fonts.

• Spec-sheet printers display or print a list of fonts with text samples.

• Analysis and repair utilities can reorganize font libraries and repair damaged fonts.

• Font Managers activate or deactivate fonts (see the section describing them above).

To find current font utilities, check the Macintosh Products Guide at www.apple.com/guide and Version Tracker at www.versiontracker.com.