Font Management: Understanding Mac OS X Font Folders.
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This two-minute video clip comes from this CreativeTechs’ January 8, 2009 workshop Font Management for Designers in Mac OS X.
A lot of designers feel powerless when it comes to managing their fonts inMac OS X because they see all these font folders spread throughout their computer. Since they don’t understand the folder structure, and there are so many fonts in so many different places most designers feel nervous about removing fonts.
Transcript of Font Management – Visualizing OS X Font Folders.
The first layer of fonts might be your classic fonts. If you are running Mac OS, earlier version of Mac OS 10 that still have the classic fonts, you would have a collection of fonts that have your fonts for Mac OS 9.
Then, on top of that, you’re going to have a folder spread on another location on your hard drive that has all of your system fonts on it.
Then elsewhere, on your hard drive you’re going to have a folder filled with fonts that have all your local fonts on it. Again, these are all the folders that we just finished talking about.
I’m just trying to represent them a little more visually to get a sense of what’s going on here.
Then on top of that, you’re going to have a folder of fonts that have your particular user fonts in them. Then, finally, on top of that, there are going to be individual custom folders for individual applications.
A lot of designers really feel powerless when it comes to managing fonts of Mac OS 10 because all of these folders are spread all over the place.
Back with Mac OS 9, there’s one folder that had fonts, and designers felt like they were empowered to be able to go in there and pull fonts out that they didn’t want. But, with Mac OS 10, there are so many fonts in so many different places that designers feel nervous about removing fonts. Since they don’t understand the folder structure, they are nervous that they can remove this or not remove that.
So, the thing I really want to focus on is, picture this as layers of acetate with different fonts on each layer. I just want to make this really simple. We, as human beings, seeing all these individual folders may get really confused and see all these folders. What your Mac sees is basically all those folders squished together into one flat sandwich. It’s almost like you have one font folder, it just happens to be spread out in four or five different places.
What I want you to get to is this sense that you can go in there and manage your fonts. Just because those fonts are spread throughout all these different folders on your computer, doesn’t mean they have to stay there or that we have to use all those folders. Effectively, when you are working, your Mac is just presenting to you one consolidated list of folders as if you took these layers of acetate and just sandwiched them all together.
The whole idea here is that even though you’ve got fonts spread throughout your computer, we are going to sandwich them all together and basically clean up those font libraries so it just becomes one clean collection of fonts.
January 30th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Craig, thanks for posting this video. Good visual.
The quote below raises some questions for me:
“…you can go in there and manage your fonts. Just because those fonts are spread throughout all these different folders on your computer, doesn’t mean they have to stay there…”
Is that to say that moving certain fonts out of Adobe- or Microsoft-generated folders is harmless?
For what it’s worth, I ran a search on any file folder on my Mac named “Fonts.” It found 42 folders, (six of which were created by me). Several of the 36 other folders were placed there by Adobe and many contained the same fonts. Three of them had a path like the one below, except for a different last number.
Library/Application Support/Adobe/PDFL/8.0
One clean collection of fonts? I dunno…
January 31st, 2009 at 12:33 am
@David, My hope with this video was to share a visual analogy for how those core font folders in Mac OS X interact. This part in the workshops comes just after we’ve discussed the locations of the 5 primary font folders in OS X, and after discussing a bit about the Application Support folder.
You are correct, there are a LOT of font folders spread throughout OS X. In this workshop, I focus primarily on the font folders that effect what shows up in the font menus in your design applications.
February 3rd, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Is this workshop specific to using native font management applications (ie, FontBook) or can the information be applied to other programs? It looks interesting…I use FontAgent Pro but my fonts have gotten out of hand. I really don’t understand how to cure the problem and am researching what resources are out there.
February 4th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
The font workshops that Craig runs usually start out focusing on how to get a handle on the fonts on your system and installed by the design applications, and then move onto his (and in general CreativeTechs’) recommendations for font management which includes the use of either Suitcase Fusion or FontAgent Pro. So yes, the workshop does cover not just getting the system under control but then managing your fonts through a font manager. As one of the techs out working on client machines I find it very useful to keep tabs on what Craig finds during the extensive testing he does with many font managers leading up to each rendition of this class.
February 27th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Okay the tease worked! How do I see the whole thing. I need some serious font management help!