Fonts—and Font Book

Mac OS X type is all smooth, all the time. Fonts in Mac OS X’s formats—called TrueType, PostScript Type 1, and OpenType—always look smooth onscreen and in printouts, no matter what the point size.

Mac OS X also comes with a program that’s just for installing, removing, inspecting, and organizing fonts. It’s called Font Book (Figure 9-7), and it’s in your Applications folder.

Where Fonts Live

Brace yourself. In Mac OS X, there are three Fonts folders. The fonts you actually see listed in the Fonts menus and Font panels of your programs are combinations of these Fonts folders’ contents.

Here’s a rundown:

  • Your private fonts (your Home folderLibraryFonts). This Fonts folder sits right inside your own Home folder. You’re free to add your own custom fonts to this folder. Go wild—it’s your font collection and yours alone. Nobody else who uses the Mac can use these fonts; they’ll never even know that you have them.

    Note

    Your Home→Library folder is ordinarily hidden. The quickest way to see it is to press Option as you choose View→Library in the Finder.

  • Main font collection (LibraryFonts). Any fonts in this folder are available to everyone to use in every program. (As with most features that affect everybody who shares your Macintosh, however, only people with Administrator accounts can change the contents of this folder.)

    Each account holder can have a separate set of fonts; your set is represented by the User icon. You can drag fonts and font families among the various Fonts folders represented here—from your User account folder to the Computer icon, for example, making them available to all account holders.

    Figure 9-7. Each account holder can have a separate set of fonts; your set is represented by the User icon. You can drag fonts and font families among the various Fonts folders represented here—from your User account folder to the Computer icon, for example, making them available to all account holders.

  • Essential system fonts (SystemLibraryFonts). This folder contains the 35 fonts that the Mac itself needs: the typefaces you see in your menus, dialog boxes, icons, and so on. You can open this folder to see these font suitcases, but you can’t do anything with them, such as opening, moving, or adding to them. Remember that, for stability reasons, the System folder is sealed under glass forever. Only the superuser can touch these files (ask a Unix geek)—and even that person would be foolish to do so.

    With the exception of the essential system fonts, you’ll find an icon representing each of these locations in your Font Book program, described next.

Note

And just to make life even more exciting, Adobe’s software installers may donate even more fonts to your cause, in yet another folder: your Home→Application Support folder.

Font Book: Installing and Managing Fonts

One of the biggest perks of Mac OS X is its preinstalled collection of over 50 great-looking fonts—“over $1,000 worth,” according to Apple, which licensed many of them from type companies. In short, fewer Mac users than ever will wind up buying and installing new fonts.

But when you do buy or download new fonts, you’re in luck. There’s no limit to the number of fonts you can install.

Looking over your fonts

Right off the bat, Font Book is great for looking at samples of each typeface. For example, click Computer, click the first font name, and then press the ↓ key. As you walk down the list, the rightmost panel shows you a sample of each font (Figure 9-7).

You can also click any font family’s flippy triangle (or highlight its name and then press →) to see the font variations it includes: Italic, Bold, and so on.

Tip

When you first open Font Book, the actual text of the typeface preview (in the right panel) is pretty generic. Don’t miss the Preview menu, though. It lets you substitute a full display of every character (choose Repertoire)—or, if you choose Custom, it lets you type your own text.

Printing a reference sheet

You can print a handy, whole-font sampler of any font. Click its name and then choose File→Print. In the Print dialog box, click the Show Details button to expand the dialog box, if necessary. You can then use the Report Type pop-up menu to choose from three reference-sheet styles. When everything looks good, click Print.

Eliminating duplicates

A bullet (•) next to a font’s name is Font Book’s charming way of trying to tell you that you’ve got copies of the same font in more than one of your Fonts folders. You might have one version of Comic Sans in your own Home→Library→Fonts folder, for example, and another in your Mac’s main Fonts folder.

Click the one you want to keep, and then choose Edit→Resolve Duplicates. Font Book turns off all other copies, and the bullet disappears.

Adding, removing, and hiding fonts

Here’s what you can do with Font Book:

  • Install a font. When you double-click a font file’s icon in the Finder, Font Book opens and presents the typeface for your inspection pleasure. If you like it, click Install Font. You’ve just installed it into your account’s Fonts folder so that it appears in the Font menus of all your programs. (If you’d rather install it so that it appears in all account holders’ Fonts menus, see Figure 9-7.)

  • Remove a font. Removing a font from your machine is easy: Highlight it in the Font Book list, and then press the Delete key. (You’re asked to confirm the decision.) Before taking such a drastic and permanent step, however, keep in mind that you can simply disable (hide) the font instead. Read on.

  • Disable a font. When you disable a font, you’re simply hiding it from your programs. You might want to turn off a font so that you can use a different version of it (bearing the same name but from a different type company, for example), or to make your Font menus shorter, or to make programs like Microsoft Word start up faster. You can always turn a disabled font back on if you ever need it again.

Tip

How’s this for a sweet feature? Mac OS X can activate fonts automatically as you need them. When you open a document that relies on a font it doesn’t have, Mac OS X activates that font and keeps it available until that particular program quits.

Actually, it does better than that. If it doesn’t see that font installed, it searches your hard drive on a quest to find the font—and then it asks you if you want it installed, so the document will look right.

To disable a font, just click it or its family name, and then click the checkbox button beneath the list (or press Shift--D). Confirm your decision by clicking Disable in the confirmation box. (Turn on “Do not ask me again” if you’re the confident sort.)

The font’s name now appears gray, and the word “Off” appears next to it, making it absolutely clear what you’ve just done. (To turn the font on again, highlight its name, and then click the now-empty checkbox button, or press Shift--D again.)

Note

When you install, remove, disable, or enable a font using Font Book, you see the changes in the Font menus and panels of your Cocoa programs immediately. You won’t see the changes in open Carbon programs, however, until you quit and reopen them.

Font collections

A collection, like any of the ones listed in the first Font Book column, is a subset of your installed fonts. Apple starts you off with collections called things like PDF (a set of standard fonts used in PDF files) and Web (fonts you’re safe using on Web pages—that is, fonts that are very likely to be installed on the Macs or Windows PCs of your Web visitors).

But you can create collections called, for example, Headline or Sans Serif, organized by font type. Or you can create collections like Brochure or Movie Poster, organized by project. Then you can switch these groups of fonts on or off at will.

To create a new collection, click the leftmost + button to create a new entry in the Collections column, whose name you can edit. Then click one of the font storage locations—User or Computer—and drag fonts or font families onto your newly created collection icon. (Recognize this process from playlists in iTunes, or albums in iPhoto?) Each font can be in as many different collections as you want.

To remove a font from the collection, click its name, and then press Delete. You’re not actually removing the font from your Mac, of course—only from the collection.

Font libraries

Don’t get confused; a font library is not the same as a font collection.

A font library is a set of fonts outside Font Book that you can install or uninstall on the fly. They don’t have to be in any of your Fonts folders; Font Book can install them from wherever they happen to be sitting on your hard drive (or even on the network). Font Book never copies or moves these font files as you install or remove them from libraries; it simply adds them to your Font menus by referencing them right where they sit.

Tip

That can be a handy arrangement if you periodically work on different projects for different clients. Why burden your day-to-day Font menu with the 37 fonts used by Beekeeper Quarterly magazine, when you need to work with those fonts only four times a year?

Once you’ve added some fonts to a library, you can even set up collections within that library.

To create a library, choose File→New Library; the library appears in the Collection list at the left side of Font Book. Now you can drag fonts into it right from the Finder, or set up collections inside it by highlighting the library’s icon and choosing File→New Collection.

The Fonts panel, generally available only in Cocoa programs, offers elaborate controls over text color, shadow, and underline styles.See the handy font sample shown here above the font lists? To get it, choose Show Preview from the pop-up menu. Or use the mousy way: Place your cursor just below the title bar (where it says Fonts) and drag downward.

Figure 9-8. The Fonts panel, generally available only in Cocoa programs, offers elaborate controls over text color, shadow, and underline styles. See the handy font sample shown here above the font lists? To get it, choose Show Preview from the pop-up menu. Or use the mousy way: Place your cursor just below the title bar (where it says Fonts) and drag downward.

The Fonts Panel

In long-established programs like Microsoft Word, choosing fonts works exactly as you’re probably used to: You choose a typeface name from the Font menu or from a formatting palette or toolbar.

Things get much more interesting when you use more recently written programs, like TextEdit, iMovie, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, iPhoto, and Mail. They offer a standard Mac OS X feature called the Fonts panel. If you’re seated in front of your Mac OS X machine now, fire up TextEdit or Pages and follow along.

Choosing fonts from the Fonts panel

Suppose you’ve just highlighted a headline in TextEdit, the Mac’s built-in word processor, and now you want to choose an appropriate typeface for it.

In TextEdit, you open the Fonts panel (Figure 9-8) by choosing Format→Font→Show Fonts (-T). Just as in Font Book, the first column lists your Collections. The second column, Family, shows the names of the actual fonts in your system. The third, Typeface, shows the various style variations—Bold, Italic, Condensed, and so on—available in that type family. (Oblique and Italic are roughly the same thing; Bold, Black, and Ultra are varying degrees of boldface.)

The last column lists a sampling of point sizes. You can use the Size slider, choose from the point-size pop-up menu, or type any number into the box at the top of the Size list.

Designing collections and favorites

At the bottom of the Fonts panel, the menu offers a few useful customization tools:

  • Add to Favorites. To designate a font as one of your favorites, specify a font, style, and size by clicking in the appropriate columns of the Fonts panel. Then use this command.

    From now on, whenever you click Favorites in the Collections column, you’ll see a list of the typefaces you’ve specified.

  • Show Preview. The Fonts panel is great and all that, but you may have noticed that, until you choose this option, it doesn’t actually show you the fonts you’re working with—something of an oversight in a window designed to help you find your fonts. See Figure 9-8 for details. (Choose this command again—now called Hide Preview—to get rid of the preview.)

    Tip

    Once you’ve opened the Preview pane, feel free to click the different sizes, typeface names, and family names to see the various effects.

  • Hide Effects. The “toolbar” of the Fonts panel lets you create special text effects—colors, shadows, and so on—as shown in Figure 9-8. This command hides that row of pop-up buttons.

  • Color. Opens the Color Picker, so you can specify a color for the highlighted text in your document.

  • Characters. Opens the Character palette, so you can choose a symbol without having to remember the crazy keyboard combo that types it.

  • Typography. Opens the Typography palette (see Figure 9-9).

  • Edit Sizes. The point sizes listed in the Fonts panel are just suggestions. You can actually type in any point size you want. By choosing this command, in fact, you can edit this list so that the sizes you use most often are only a click away.

  • Manage Fonts. Opens Font Book, described earlier in this chapter.

The Typography palette is a collapsible menagerie of fancy type effects, which vary by font. In this example, turning on Common Ligatures creates fused letter pairs like fl and fi; the Small Capitals option created the “Do Not Drink” style; and so on.

Figure 9-9. The Typography palette is a collapsible menagerie of fancy type effects, which vary by font. In this example, turning on Common Ligatures creates fused letter pairs like fl and fi; the Small Capitals option created the “Do Not Drink” style; and so on.

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