Fonts & Encodings

Chapter 6. 6 Font Management on the Macintosh

Our concern in this chapter will be the installation and management of fonts under Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. The Mac OS 9 operating system is the fruit of a long development process that began in 1984 with System 1.0, which came with the very first Macintosh. It is not astonishing that practically all extant types of fonts are found under Mac OS 9. We shall begin by describing these types of fonts and giving a little glimpse at font management à la Macintosh.

But Mac OS 9 will soon be nothing but a fleeting memory, since Mac OS X, the new Unix-based operating system, now comes standard on Macintoshes. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Mac OS X aimed to simplify font management while also adding new functionality. We shall discuss the new features in the second part of this chapter.

Nevertheless, one thing has remained unchanged throughout the long course of development that led to Mac OS X: the ease of installing fonts. All that was necessary, dixit Apple, was to place them in the system folder (under Mac OS 9 and earlier systems) or in one of the designated folders (under Mac OS X). What more, then, need we say about installing fonts on the Macintosh?

In fact, a number of factors combine to make font management on the Macintosh more complex than Apple claims. First of all, fonts placed in the system folder are loaded into memory; thus they take up RAM and slow down both booting and the launching of applications (which systematically ...