Managing fonts and fontbook.app

cvbotr wrote: Thirdly, please: If my wife wants to have say only 30 or forty fonts loaded up with illustator at a given time how on earth does this work.

The fonts that Illustrator makes available in its font menu are the fonts installed system-wide (/Library/Fonts) + the fonts installed just for your user (/Users/your_username/Library/Fonts) + the fonts installed for Illustrator only (/Applications/Adobe Illustrator CSX/Fonts) + the fonts that may be available only to Adobe applications (e.g. /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts).

If you want only 30 fonts available in Illustrator's font menu you'll have to remove the unwanted fonts from all the locations mentioned above. Beware that if you do so, the other apps you have installed (Adobe or not) will only have 30 fonts available as well. (They will likely have more because there are a few fonts that OS X doesn't let you remove, e.g. Helvetica).

With FontBook you won't be able to manage fonts installed in Adobe-owned directories, so you may have to manually move some files around, or use a more robust font manager.

Miguel Sousa

Type Development Team

Adobe Systems

cvbotr wrote: If my wife wants to have say only 30 or forty fonts loaded up with illustator at a given time how on earth does this work.  I am only asking this because someone sometime ago said to me that sometimes problems exist if you have too many fonts loaded in one go into cs3.  In all my years as a photoshop user though I have never ever heard of this.

Having too many fonts active can hurt the performance of any application.

There are fools unwise users who have literally hundreds or even thousands of fonts active simultaneously. With FAP, you can have only the fonts you need for a given job.  You'll be able to read all about it on the FAP site.

In my case, I have in the neighborhood of five thousand fonts on my computer, give or take a couple of hundred.   But I have only a few dozen font families active through FAP, and that's only because I need typeface support for eight languages.   FAP activates fonts automatically for me if I open any document of any kind that needs fonts that are not already active, and I can open fonts on the fly if I need to create a new document with an exotic , specialized, esoteric or unusual typeface that's inactive, though a re-launch of the application may be needed, but not a restart of the machine.

If I had all my fonts active, my applications would crawl like slugs and I'd be having crashes many times per hour.

Your other questions can be addressed more adequately in the Adobe Illustrator forum across the hall and, for Font Book, on the Apple discussion boards.

Chris,

Apple's Font Book (notice the space) is not a robust font manager at all—as you have discovered.

(FontBook.app, without a space, is a German application by Lemke Software and is NOT a font manager at all.)

In the Mac World, the preferred font manager is FAP (FontAgent Pro).  It lets you activate only the fonts you want, activates fonts on the fly, creates sets, etc.

FAP also happens to be the best at ferreting out bad, duplicate and otherwise problem fonts.

They have a fully functional 30-day trial version for you to test.

http://www.insidersoftware.com/