Activating Fonts in the Operating System

Just having a font somewhere on your hard drive isn't enough. You must activate it to make it available to all the applications on your computer. Both Windows and the Macintosh provide built-in font activation. If you tend to use the same fonts, and don't need to frequently add fonts, the built-in font activation schemes may be sufficient for your needs.

Apple Font Book

Apple's free Font Book utility ships as part of OS X. If you're using a limited selection of fonts for the majority of your work and don't need the control afforded by creating font sets, Font Book is probably adequate. It may appear to be a font manager, but earlier versions of Font Book did some ugly things. Fonts were moved into the system library, and then deleted from their original location. (There goes your job folder!) And it never deactivated a font that was removed from Font Book's collections. Fonts remained in the system, eternally activated.

Mercifully, this uncivilized behavior is somewhat improved under OS 10.4 (Tiger). Font Book now copies rather than moves font files. And it actually deactivates fonts when Font Book's collections are disabled or removed. However, it still leaves a duplicate of the font files in the your Library/Fonts folder.

Windows Control Panel

PC users can activate fonts by placing them in the Fonts folder of the Control Panel. Much like Apple's Font Book, the Fonts control panel provides a common system location so that fonts are available to applications. Deleting a font from Windows' Fonts control panel puts it in the Recycle Bin. There is no provision for creating sets of fonts. Activated fonts are stored together in a single folder, and they're all awake, all the time.