Too many fonts in Big Sur and no way to turn them off.

[Mardulia]

I've been fighting with my font menus, actually drowning in them. Seems like the 641 system fonts in Big Sur are locked and there's nothing you can do about it. I just had a conversation over in the Apple Community and apparently it would "take 10 minutes" for developers to create a way to customize font menus for end users. Is that correct? Does anyone know and is Adobe working on that? I just want to find a button some where that specifies English only fonts - or what ever language you want to use - and reduce the enormously long font menus that have appeared in my Adobe apps.

This topic has absolutely nothing to do with the Adobe Fonts service. Moving it to the Type & Typography community - MOD.

[Dov Isaacs]

This issue isn't particular to MacOS. Depending upon how one does the installation, many international character set fonts are also installed in Windows.

This is not something that really belongs directly in an application. There are existing third party font management utilities that support this type (no pun intended) of functionality; investigate that as a solution.

And no, implementing  “a way to customize font menus” absolutely would not “take 10 minutes” – anyone telling you that is not at all credible.

[John5CB9]

I'm actually the one who made that claim in Apple Support Communities. Specifically, it took me 9 minutes to add font language detection to a demo app. I wasn't claiming any kind of "customization of font menus". I was specifically talking about using Apple font APIs to enable or disable fonts based on language. I think it took me another 9 minutes to add support for font groups from Font Book.

I see these posts on Apple Support Communities on a regular basis. They are extremely annoying - annoying enough for me to come over here and make an account. That's annoying.

We usually do recommend 3rd party font management utilities. Users typically don't accept that as an answer. They want an Apple fix. They want Apple to remove these foreign language fonts. They don't care if that would require Windows-style "language packs". They just want these fonts gone. And they are always Adobe users. 

As far as I can tell, Adobe is just reading every font on disk and ignoring Apple's font APIs that contain both language and group metadata. So I'm putting the responsibility back on you, Adobe employee. It's really not that hard. If random guy on the internet can do it in 9 minutes, surely Adobe has the resources to provide a better experience for Mac users.

Here is a link to a demo app I wrote to try to convince people that my claims are, in fact, quite credible: https://github.com/etresoft/MultiLingualFontLister 

[Dov Isaacs]

@John5CB9,

If you really believe that this is something that should be an OS-level feature, then make a strong suggestion to both Microsoft and Apple to allow for deletion (or at best total hiding) of user-specified fonts or collections of fonts. For cross-application compatibility, this shouldn't be something that the application has to worry about.

But please remember that (1) fonts often contain support for multiple language systems, alphabets, etc., (2) many fonts are not particulary good in terms of self-identifying language support, and (3) there is a big difference between having fonts in a menu list for applications such as InDesign and having the fonts available for display use in a document, a subtle but important distinction.

However, if you really think that Adobe should implement some form of font exclusion/inclusion mechanism for font menus or choices, may I suggest that you go to https://indesign.uservoice.com/ and make your case there for a new feature. InDesign's engineering teams don't frequent these support communities. There are similar sites for the other products – https://illustrator.uservoice.com/, https://feedback.photoshop.com/, etc. – such a feature should be consistent across the Adobe applications and across operating system platforms.

[Mardulia]

Ok- that’s helpful, thank you. I will post in indesign uservoice as you
suggest. But not right this minute. Bed time. Thanks for your help, Andrea
--

Andrea Pluhar
Pluhar Creative Design Services

[address and phone and personal info removed by moderator]

[John5CB9]

I don't know or care about Microsoft, but this has been an OS-level feature on the Mac for decades.

Regarding (1) and (2), that is likely why Apple made these fonts part of the operating system and provided APIs to use with them. These APIs provide a guarantee of conformance to expectations with respect to language support and metadata. (3) is particularly notable because it establishes a very good reason not to allow these OS fonts to be deleted by the user, as you suggested. The API has explicit support not just for font language and collection, but also differentiates between fonts provided for general use and those included strictly for document support (see https://support.apple.com/HT211240). Software that doesn't use the API has no way to tell the difference.

I'm not an Adobe customer. My only desire is to have Adobe customers direct their efforts to the appropriate place, which is Adobe. You have given them 3 good reasons to support Apple's font APIs, and I appreciate that. But this is one of those problems that is easier to just fix than to argue about.

[Mardulia]

Dear Mr Issacs,

It is, in this case a Big Sur issue. In Big Sur there are 641 Fonts in the system library where they are  inaccessible to any font management system, native or 3rd party, I've tried. And you can't hack them without possibly doing some serious damage (apparently). Anyway you cant delete them at all without going into Terminal. That being said, I dont really care how many fonts are locked away in the system library, so much as I care about the unwieldy lenth of my font menus! They are basically too long to use efficiently and it's frustrating to have to scroll through 65 (at least, I havent counted them) versions of non-english Nolo to get to anything past Nolo. And not just Nolo, there's many version of Stix, etc, Arabic fonts, and various Asian fonts. Its like looking for your own socks among all the socks from a vast extended family, brothers, sisters, children, cousins, uncles and aunts, all stored in one very deep drawer. 

Thanks for listening,

Andrea

[Dov Isaacs]

@Mardulia,

See my response above to @John5CB9.

[kcashland]

Would it be difficult to move the "missing fonts" list to the top of the fonts list? Currently we have to scroll from the very bottom for each missing font, through your nicely organized foreign fonts and all the English fonts. That seems to be a choice that Adobe made, rather than an issue for a font management utility.

[jane-e]

One thing you can do as a work-around for the time being is to "favorite" the typefaces you want to see, then filter to show only your favorites.

~ Jane

[kcashland]

Thanks very much, Jane. That's the most helpful idea I have seen so far. I'll give it a try.

[jane-e]

You're welcome, @kcashland. The filter for Favorites is a toggle, so if you add typefaces, you just have to remember to tag them as Favorites. All the Noto typefaces from Apple were driving me crazy!

~ Jane