Font Management on Mac

phly

phly

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Good Day & Happy Youth Day to those in SA.

My macbook has been getting increasingly slower or rather i see the "beach ball" or "spin-wheel" of death or the other names it may be known for, more often than I should especially when designing something in Adobe Suite slowing things down. I have attributed this to having alot of fonts. Is there a way to manage the huge library of fonts that i have. Perhaps a way to install/run them when i'm using a certain Adobe app and somehow "uninstalled" or "deactivated" for normal laptop use.

Any software recommendations or alternative ways that may come close in helping me manage the many fonts I have besides installing half of the collection hoping that I may not need to install a font or font family from the other half soon. This is for a macbook pro core i5 running el capitan.

Thanks
 
I don't imagine a ton of fonts would slow your machine down, well, other than if you've somehow filled your entire hard drive with them... Sounds to me like it's more of a processing and rendering issue in Adobe. First thing I'd do is pop in more RAM if it's an option. What year model is the Mac?
Back to your question 'tho... Used Suitcase Fusion for a while but, over the years, I've reverted back to Font Book.
 
greg0205 said:
I don't imagine a ton of fonts would slow your machine down, well, other than if you've somehow filled your entire hard drive with them... Sounds to me like it's more of a processing and rendering issue in Adobe. First thing I'd do is pop in more RAM if it's an option. What year model is the Mac?
Back to your question 'tho... Used Suitcase Fusion for a while but, over the years, I've reverted back to Font Book.
Click to expand...
They could - especially if there are a lot of duplicates. Corrupted/damaged fonts are also a likely culprit.

Font Book can resolve most issues I've come across.
 
Font Book.

It's built in.

There is absolutely no reason for a third party application that does the exact same thing.

That being said, beyond corrupted fonts a lot of them loaded shouldn't cause any beach balling.

If anything it would be large files and running out of memory.


Why do "designers" receive no Font Management training? It always astounded me while in the publishing industry.

One has to also ask why you need thousands of fonts in the first place. Build a collection of the best/favourites and with with them. Don't get a new one every time you work on something.

Not to mention in the real world with copyright issues and no such thing as "free" fronts you'll find that the big ticket companies actually use a very small handful of fonts.
 
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bwana said:
They could - especially if there are a lot of duplicates. Corrupted/damaged fonts are also a likely culprit.

Font Book can resolve most issues I've come across.
Click to expand...

Good to know. Thanks bwana.
 
I have my own favourites but i think I also have a "hoarding" syndrome. Where i keep things just incase I may need them in future. I also i was used to the windows side of things and only recently moved to Mac and so was unsure if the playing field is similar or if there are rules. The system is an early 2011 13 inch core i5 2.3GHz. Ram is 12GB and the HD is an SSD. If its not fonts then it must be something else however I cant trace what it is. Very few items at startup. Booting up is quick. Perhaps there is another thing that is causing the beach ball spinning. Normal usage seems fine its only when using Adobe Suite that I notice it.

Have used font book and have cleared up most of the duplicates if not all. And those few not cleared are disabled. If font book is enough then I will not bother getting a 3rd party app. Will look into it properly.

Interesting point though on the reason/purpose of needing thousands of fonts @Sauronza...
 
Best is to build collections inside Font Book which you can switch on and off as required.

I fail to remember the exact numbers but we went through a font review process every three or so years and it was always kept around 70 odd additional fonts for all designers to use.

That's extra fonts outside of the standard Adobe, Office and Apple ones.

Third party tools use the exact same manner to manage fonts so add no real value.
 
That makes sense. That's actually quite clever. As easy as switching on and off what I need when I need it. Thanks for that info. Will take time out tomorrow to review what I have. What I need and what I don't and what I might need.
 
phly said:
That makes sense. That's actually quite clever. As easy as switching on and off what I need when I need it. Thanks for that info. Will take time out tomorrow to review what I have. What I need and what I don't and what I might need.
Click to expand...

How many fonts do you have installed?
 
According to font book all my fonts total 1 149 only. Not as many as I thought.
 
Out of habit I normally install all these fonts "just incase" I may need something extravagant someday on a design. I dont use each and every one of them infact i use quite a few since i stick to the tried and tested. However the best answer i can give to that Q is out of age old habit of installing them for that unforeseeable future when I may need them.
 
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