How I manage fonts on my Mac

[@ninobien]

Similar like you, a designer and developer. Very straight forward advice. Thank you! 🙂

[@hibhaven]

I am a photographer and an aspiring designer. I came across the wonderful world of fonts a year ago and since then have been downloading left-right and centre and now have over 500 fonts in my font book (after curating what I need, from a larger set of 1000+ fonts). I too organise the way you mentioned by creating collections. I have a question: Does having a large number of fonts slow down the Mac, or any apps of Adobe etc?

[@angieherrerapdx]

Great question! In my experience, no, that many fonts hasn't slowed down my Mac. I don't have nearly as many as you do so my reply is based on past experiences on much older Macs. I would assume newer Macs handle things better. The only issue with Adobe apps I've had is simply needing to restart the app (Illustrator or Photoshop, for example) so that it shows a newly added font. Otherwise, all good. Hope that helps!

[@kesler3684]

How do you change in font app to change from downloading as "user" to "computer" Because when I download a font to my Mac it goes directly to my user and I do not have a option to change to computer before it goes into ones. so they will go to all apps I am using?

[@Block81]

I'm really not sure; I've never tried or had to do that. "User" fonts should be usable in all your apps.

[@Entertainment-us6gt]

Oh boy! the font issue. This is an everlasting thing with graphic designer. What I really dislike is when opening up the font panel in any Adobe App, is to see soooo many useless fonts with indian, chinese and malasian characters, to begin with. I can disable some on Font Book, but others simply wont. So this is a pet peeve for me. As for a font manager app, I used Suitcase, but it stopped auto-activating the fonts. I guess Font Book wont do the automatic activation.

[@Block81]

Auto-activation in what way? My experience has been that you simply add a font to Font Book and it's available. If you're referring to being available on Adobe apps, yeah, that's a pain. You have to restart the app (such as Photoshop or Illustrator) in order for the new font to show.

[@Entertainment-us6gt]

@@Block81 What I meant by auto activation is that by using an applications like Suitcase, whenever you opened a document that contained a font that was inactive, this app would automatically activate it. That’s a great plus. Do you keep active hundreds of fonts at the same time?

[@Block81]

@@Entertainment-us6gt I can't really answer much more about auto-activation; Font Book just works for me. I do get what you mean though. I've gotten extremely picky about the fonts I have, so it's not longer hundreds. But yeah, they're active. For client projects where they have provided fonts (that I can only use for their project), I'll install and then uninstall after the project is complete.