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lowdencraftww
lowdencraftww
Participant
February 2, 2026
Question

Comparing local and Adobe fonts for duplicates.

  • February 2, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 26 views

I have a large collection of locally installed fonts and I want to homogenize it with Adobe fonts. I wish to remove all the fonts that are installed locally where Adobe fonts has an equivalent. Only fonts not available in Adobe will be installed locally.

I cannot find on the web a list of the fonts available on Adobe fonts. 

Is this possible?

    2 replies

    B
    Community Expert
    Bobby HendersonCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 3, 2026

    Be careful about removing locally installed fonts in favor of those that are synced via Adobe Fonts. Certain fonts are system fonts required by the computer's operating system. Some locally installed fonts may be required by installed applications. Not too long ago Monotype added a pretty big fonts package to Adobe Fonts; some of those fonts are already included in Windows as system fonts. I would not remove the locally installed version of Arial in favor of the version carried at Adobe Fonts.

     

    If you have a large collection of fonts that numbers in thousands of font files it is certainly not good to have that many fonts locally installed. That can bog down computing performance.

     

    Third party font management apps can make use of large font collections without them being installed directly in the operating system. But those apps have their own quirks. Also, not all fonts are created equal. Some fonts are very well designed and work great while others may be badly authored. A large font collection is likely to have fonts that fall in both categories. Buggy fonts can cause all kinds of problems, such as performance hangs and even application crashes. Font management apps can get tripped up badly by buggy fonts.

      lowdencraftww
      lowdencraftwwAuthor
      Participant
      February 3, 2026

      Thank you for your good advice. 

      The truth is that I am comparing Adobe with an Extensis Font server instance. I have an export of all the fonts on the server and I want to see what possible duplicates there are.

      B
      Community Expert
      Bobby HendersonCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      February 4, 2026

      Adobe Fonts is pretty different from a font management app like those from Extensis. I like Adobe Fonts for the variety of type families it has from dozens of different type companies. Adding and removing fonts is fairly easy. I'm using Windows-based computers; sometimes Windows gives me headaches when I want to do some housekeeping and remove some unused fonts. It will say certain fonts I'm trying to remove are currently in use. Adobe Fonts doesn't give me any of those headaches.

       

      I'll often browse for fonts at the Adobe Fonts web site by looking at the Foundries list. The alphabetical list of companies and how many type families each company offers is a pretty quick way to drill down to specific type families (as long as you remember which companies make which fonts).

      Tarun Saini
      Community Manager
      Tarun SainiCommunity Manager
      Community Manager
      February 3, 2026

      Hi ​@lowdencraftww,

       

      Thanks for reaching out! I’d like to inform you that there isn’t a downloadable master list of all Adobe Fonts families, and we don’t offer a built‑in tool to bulk compare your local font files against the full catalog.

       

      You can browse and search families on https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts , and activate any font you want to use in your apps.

       

      Regards,

      Tarun

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