Chapter 28: Managing Fonts
In This Chapter
Defining what fonts are
Discovering where OS X stores fonts
Understanding font formats
Using Font Book to add and manage fonts
Knowing when to use third-party font managers
Accessing special characters
When the Mac was introduced in 1984, two things set it apart from the PCs of the day. One was the use of a mouse-driven graphical user interface. The other was the use of fonts (also referred to as typefaces). Never before could you use typography in your documents, and the result was the desktop publishing revolution that ushered in the popularization of the media because anyone could produce good-quality publications. When the web rose in the late 1990s, fonts were part of the basic mix of its presentation capabilities.
So the Mac has a long history of being font oriented. Over the years, font technology has changed significantly, and the Mac OS has kept up with those changes. OS X works with five kinds of font technologies, and it provides a management tool that lets you control which fonts are active. (Because each font takes system memory, if you have a large font collection, you may not want them all loaded in memory at once.)
