Managing Fonts in Font Book
To help you manage the fonts on your Mac, Apple provides the Font Book application. Why would you manage fonts? The key reason is that if you have lots of fonts, having them all loaded in memory can slow down your Mac's performance. Another reason is that if you have lots of fonts, you can be overwhelmed with font choices in your word-processing and page-layout software's font lists.
But Font Book also helps you deal with duplicate font files (which can confuse OS X and applications) and corrupted font files (which can cause application and system crashes). Figure 28.2 shows Font Book, with a font family previewed. (See the section on management options for fonts later in this chapter to learn how to deal with issues such as duplicate fonts.)
Figure 28.2
Left: The Font Book application, with a font preview shown. Right: The preview window for a font family.
Automatic font monitoring
Font Book tracks the state of your fonts and can take action when fonts are added or deleted if you tell it to in its Preferences dialog box (choose Font Book⇒Preferences or press 
+, [comma]). Note that Font Book tracks this status even when it's not running.
You have these options:
• Default Install Location: This pop-up menu determines which Fonts folder to add new fonts ...
Get OS X Mountain Lion Bible now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
