Apple Font Book

Apple’s free Font Book utility ships as part of OS X. If you’re using a limited selection of fonts for the majority of your work and don’t need the control afforded by creating font sets, Font Book is probably adequate. It may appear to be a font manager, but earlier versions of Font Book did some ugly things. Fonts were moved into the system library, and then deleted from their original location. (There goes your job folder!) And it never deactivated a font that was removed from Font Book’s collections. Fonts remained in the system, eternally activated.

Mercifully, this uncivilized behavior is somewhat improved under OS 10.4 (Tiger). Font Book now copies rather than moves font files. And it actually deactivates fonts when Font Book’s collections are disabled or removed. However, it still leaves a duplicate of the font files in the your Library/Fonts folder.