Explore Font Book

Explore Font Book
Mac Tip #307/19-Sept-2007

Font Book, available in your Mac’s Applications folder, helps you manage your fonts. When I wrote last week about installing a font, I pointed out that Font Book would open up to display the font and offer to install it.

Open Font Book and the first thing you’ll see is a list of the fonts on your Mac, grouped into ‘Collections’, along with a preview of whichever font happens to be selected.

Use the Size pop-up near the top right of the window, or use the slider at the right edge of the window, to see the selected font at various sizes.

Select a font and choose Preview from the gear menu at top left of the window to see a preview of the font in a separate window.

If the font is available in different faces, such as bold or italic, you can preview the face by choosing it from the pop-up in the Preview window.

Corrupted fonts can cause all sorts of problems. To check one or more fonts select them and choose Validate Font from the gear menu. A window appears, showing the results.

In that window you can also select fonts and remove them.

Rather than removing fonts, you may wish to disable them. Select the font in the main Font Book window and click on the check box at the bottom of the Font listing. An alert appears, asking you to confirm the action.

You can also disable and remove fonts by selecting them and choosing the action from the gear menu.

There are some other useful features in Font Book. More on those things in another Tip.