Take Control of Customizing Tiger

Chapter . Fix Your Fonts

Font management has always been a problem on the Mac. The main trouble is that once you have more than a few fonts, Font menus become long and unwieldy. Mac OS X is no exception; plus, it’s even harder than in previous systems to know what fonts are installed and where they are. In Mac OS X, fonts can be in any of (at least) four places:

• /System/Library/Fonts

• /Library/Fonts

• ~/Library/Fonts

• the Fonts folder of your Classic System Folder

Tip

Here’s a little-known fact: instead of installing fonts directly in your user ~/Library/Fonts folder, you can put them in a folder within your user ~/Library/Fonts folder. The system will still see them. I use this trick a lot, as a way of reminding myself why a font was installed. For example, ...