How to get rid of dozens of irrelevant fonts in the font menu?

[TypoMan23]

I am new-ish to CC, and I noticed that I now have dozens of irrelevant fonts in my menu bar. Fonts I will never ever use. They only clutter up the menu.

In my work I use only 3-4 type families, and have no need for all these other fonts that seem to have been installed on my system since upgrading from CS3 to CC, and from OSX to Monterey.

Is there any way to get rid of all these fonts I will never use, so that my font menu will only show the ones that I need?

Thank you for any help. 

[DTP-1984]

Absolutely!! Back in the day we had Now Utilities. It allowed to colour each font, place them in the order you'd like. I remember blue was serif for me and red san-serif etc. A dream. The font menu was static and started from the top when you clicked on the font menu which was directly in the menu bar - called fonts. I have written to every desktop publishing for decades about this.  Apple of course changed OS security and both Now Utilities and MyFontMenu.  Great software but Apple killed it. Ya think things would get better but in many ways it got so much worse.  

[Abambo]

It is a bit of nuisance, yes. And it seems to get worse with every new OS upgrade, be it on Mac or Windows. These past few days, I've been busy setting up a new PC — latest versions of Windows 11 and of Adobe Creative Cloud — and without installing a single font of my own choosing, the InDesign font menu is already populated by at least a hundred fonts, most of which I don't plan on ever using.

By @Piet De Ridder

Microsoft has quite a bunch of fonts installed that come with their OS. Besides this, there are only a marginally number of fonts installed by other applications. But some applications come with an extensive number of additional fonts. That's part of the game. 

Adobe, however, gives you full control over the fonts, with current applications, you won't have extensive font libraries on a DVD as with legacy applications: https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/kb/add-fonts-desktop.html

And you can at any moment deactivate all the Adobe fonts, as Adobe applications will install them again, when a file gets opened, that uses those fonts. It is even recommended to clean-up the fonts regularily. If you are using non Adobe fonts, however, like Google fonts, you need to keep track of your fonts manually, or by using a third party application. 

[Piet De Ridder]

(...) Adobe, however, gives you full control over the fonts (...) And you can at any moment deactivate all the Adobe fonts (...)

By @Abambo

That's not entirely true, Abambo. Even with Adobe Fonts switched off (and not a single font installed via the Creative Cloud fonts app), there are still a few dozen Adobe fonts that appear in the various font menus of the software on my system. Now, I'm just a graphic designer and not a software expert so I might be wrong about this, but it seems to me that those fonts got installed when InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator were installed. Because each of those apps have their own fonts folder — within their respective 'Required' folders — that contain anywhere between 23 and 45 fonts each. Yes, there is quite a bit of overlap between these three folders, but still, there are a good many fonts (from Adobe) in the font menus that (1) have nothing whatsoever to do with Creative Cloud or its font-managing powers, and (2) also function beyond the reach of any font-managing software I've tried. Windows' built-in font management — which is, granted, a bit of a joke — doesn't see them, FontBase doesn't see them and neither does what is, in my view anyway, by far the best font-managing software for Windows: High-Logic's very thorough and powerful MainType Pro. The latter would see them if I were to point it to where to look, but even then: the odd thing is that it doesn't recognize these fonts as being installed. And installed they are, because the appear in all the font menus.

Fonts like a.o. Trajan Color, Acumin, Source, Myriad, Minion, two emoji fonts and a handful of non-Western fonts aren't picked up on by any font management software I'm familiar with. Now, I immediately agree, while four or five of these are eminently useful fonts, it goes beyond my understanding why I, or anyone else for that matter, would want to have Trajan Color readily available for daily use. Or why it is assumed that I have any use for the sillyness (and uglyness) that is the language of emojis. Or why I, designing in and for the decidedly Western territory of the Benelux (and occasionaly France), can't stop the 20-or-so non-Western fonts — quite a few from Microsoft, the remainder from Adobe — from appearing in my font menus.

If, with the following, I should violate the forum etiquette (by referring to competing product), I apologize in advance, but there's one app that has a nice solution for all of this and that is the drawing software from a company called Corel. Its font menu includes a pretty advanced filter set allowing the user to keep the font menu free from not only all system fonts, but also from non-Latin and/or non-Western fonts. You can, moreover, also filter on font type, font technology, embedding rights and an extensive choice of font characteristics. The result being that the font menu of that app lists 21 fonts, each and every one of them of my choosing, while, at the same time, InDesign's font menu lists 10 times that number (or therabouts), the vast majority of them not of my choosing. 

And that's with Adobe Fonts disabled.

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