I first want to mention the notation of file locations. By ’notation’ I am referring to the path name. This should help novice computer users and those unfamiliar with standard notation to learn how to navigate to the folders mentioned throughout this article.

I can’t tell you exactly what the path to your home account looks like (since I don’t know your short user name), so here are some handy notes of reference.

A file specification is the entire path from the root of the volume it resides on to the end of the file name. For example, here is the file specification for the Terminal application:

/Applications/Utilities/Terminal

This is known as a hierarchical file specification in geek terminology, but it’s called a canonical filename for short.

/ The beginning forward slash (as in the example to the Terminal application) of a file specification is always the root level of your boot volume.

~/ The tilde-forward slash pair is always your home directory (folder), i.e., the home folder of the current user login session.

So in most cases, the path to the Fonts folder in your home user account would be ~/Library/Fonts/. Which, if you start by double clicking the icon of the boot drive on the desktop, the path can also be presented as

/Users/your_user_account/Library/Fonts/.

The following words: program, application or app all have the same meaning. I use them interchangeably throughout this article.

Why the extensive rewrite of this article?

As with the previous cutoff, it had simply become too long and a mess of, “you can do xxx under this OS, but not this one”. It becomes difficult to keep so many straight. My goal then was to use Big Sur as the new starting point as it’s the first OS version where the user could no longer remove any fonts installed by the OS. That eliminated virtually all of the can/can’t situations. Or, at least I thought it would until discovering Ventura blocks you from disabling fonts in the Supplemental folder. Now we’re back to a can/can’t issue anyway. But at least it’s still much less of a mess.

The main can/can’t issue now is the font manager reviews in section 12. Anywhere it says a font manager can disable the Supplemental fonts is true for Monterey or earlier, but not for Ventura, and very likely any OS to come after it.

Cutting everything off at Big Sur also allowed me to eliminate full sections that were completely obsolete for that OS and later. We’re three versions of macOS in now from Catalina. It was time to move that data to an older, static page.

Thoughts and suggestions on what to do regarding the System fonts in Ventura, and likely from here on:

Apple cut off access to handling even the Supplemental fonts in Ventura. You may wonder why since you’re not trying to delete them from the drive, just disabling the ones you don’t need. It does no good to call or write Apple about it since they won’t answer such questions. From what I’ve been able to find on the subject, it comes down to this: All of the extra fonts included with the OS over the decades, not used for the GUI itself, have never been there for the user. Apple considers them useful only as backward compatibility document support. What support is that? Good question, because I don’t know either. But that is the story I’ve read for their reason to exist. This list changes depending on your region. For English users, it’s mainly anything tagged as a non-Latin font.

The equally decades long problem this now creates is people used these fonts, both for personal use and professionally. After all, we can see them in our font lists, so why not use them? That’s now a problem because there are millions of documents which used these fonts that are now at the mercy of what Apple does with them. Such as, they can change the metrics and cause overflow or underflow issues on a standing book that goes into occasional reprints. It doesn’t happen often, but Apple sometimes also removes fonts from the System folder.

Yes, you can dig up the older versions of a font you may need from previous versions of OS X / macOS. And really, you should be archiving the exact fonts you used in a project with all of its other files for just this reason. But now you won’t be able to disable a newer, conflicting version. You’ll have to resort to an older OS to process standing projects. This will be more difficult over time as older Macs become unserviceable.

How does this affect the home user? Not much, or at all. You create your holiday letter, a lost dog poster, a term paper, etc. and print it. It’s a one-time use document. What happens to any fonts you used with it after that isn’t an issue.

The problem is mainly in publishing. Let’s say your client has a love affair with Arial. They use it as a corporate font on letterheads, envelopes, etc. Arial is a font created by Monotype and what’s included with macOS isn’t a full set. If you want to purchase the entire Arial family, you have to take a trip (as one official source) over to MyFonts. There you can purchase up to the full 28 variations. You can also subscribe on Monotype’s site for access to their fonts. Problem: You can’t disable the Arial variations installed by Ventura. You have no control over any future changes to those typefaces that may throw off type flow in your standing projects. Not without, again, resorting to using an older OS.

The above isn’t only hypothetical. A user on Apple’s forums ran into exactly such an issue when Apple started hiding fonts back in El Capitan. They used the OS installed font Seravek as their corporate font. While it appeared in older documents, they could no longer select that font for new documents in Pages, or any other Apple created app.

My suggestion? Go out of your way to avoid using any fonts installed by the OS for anything. Have your clients do the same so you always have control over the use of that font style. If they’re glued to Arial, Times New Roman or some other OS installed font, encourage them (a lot!) to get the adhesive remover out. There are literally thousands of fonts to choose from that look nearly identical to these and other book fonts installed by the OS. Pick something else.

Getting around Apple’s deep desire to hide fonts you may need to use:

You can still activate your own purchased fonts that duplicate some of those in the Supplemental folder, such as Seravek and SuperClarendon. The versions available on Adobe’s CC font server (and purchased fonts of the same name available elsewhere) do not have the same internal names as the OS supplied versions, so both can be active. You will still never see the OS installed fonts in Apple’s apps, though the Adobe or other acquired versions will list.

But even then, there’s no guarantee they’ll work everywhere. For example, Adobe’s Seravek font appears in BBEdit, Font Book and TextEdit, but will not list in Freeform, Pages, or Microsoft’s free version of Outlook.

A change all third party vendors are going to have to handle:

For a long time, many apps, both Apple’s and third party, required your third party fonts to be in the user account Fonts folder, or the root Library’s Fonts folder to appear in their font lists. Even as recently as the 2021 version of SoftMaker Office, the suite would pay no attention to fonts activated in place. This has been remedied in the recently released 2024 version.

Why is this important? For example, if you’re using either Adobe’s or Monotype’s font subscription services, the fonts are activated in place. You have no choice in the matter. Meaning, vendors can no longer pretend the local Fonts folders are the only place they need to look for fonts being activated or deactivated.

It was always a poor programming practice to treat two fixed locations as the only place to watch for third party fonts. Especially since the APIs necessary for detecting registered/unregistered fonts have been around for well over a decade. They just weren’t using them. Now they have no choice but to manage font activation/deactivation correctly if they plan to remain a viable choice for their customers. Those who don’t will see their users move on to competing apps that allow them to use fonts activated in place.

New info, 8/21/2023: My previous note, two paragraphs above (now edited out as it was incorrect), stated the fonts activated through the Adobe Creative Cloud app don’t exist on your Mac. The correct information is, yes they do. All fonts activated in the CC app are copied from Adobe’s server and saved to a hidden folder in your user account at:

~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CoreSync/plugins/livetype/.r

Since the last subfolder name starts with a period, it is automatically hidden. To view it (and most other hidden items on your Mac), press Command+Shift+. (period). Where Adobe actually puts the fonts you activate varies. The .r folder is just one of several hidden subfolders you’ll find within the livetype folder. You’ll have to check each of them to see where your activated fonts ended up.

The stored, Finder level font files will not have the name of the font, but will be given a number. Such as .49247.otf. Note that even the stored font name has a period in front of it to sort of double hide it.

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macOS uses a folder priority to locate and open fonts. The user account Fonts folder is given priority over the root Library Fonts folder.

~/Library/Fonts/

/Library/Fonts/

Fonts activated from Connect Fonts or other third party font manager not located on the Mac in any of the above folders are given the least priority overall. You can see then that a version of Helvetica activated by your font manager will be superseded by any version of Helvetica located in any of the previously listed folders. In order to use your PostScript fonts activated by your font manger, all like named versions must be removed from the higher priority folders. However, it’s no longer possible to remove or disable the OS installed versions of Helvetica and some others.

macOS’s Font Book has preferential treatment here. By that, I mean fonts you activate using Font Book will get a higher priority over other font managers as it uses the folders listed above to activate and deactivate fonts. This, if you’re using the default method of adding fonts in Font Book. They are copied to the Fonts folder of your user account. As you can see in the list above, that folder has the highest priority.

The advantage of Font Book (besides being free) is that by knowing these rules, you can try to quickly force preference of one font over another of the same name by placing the font in a Fonts folder that has a higher priority, although you should always avoid knowingly doing this. A font conflict will almost always prevent either font from showing up in any application if both are active.

Font Book in Big Sur 11.x through Sonoma 14.x

Automatic font activation has been removed from the preferences. Testing with both a Collection and a Library set confirms that auto activation has been removed from Font Book. Any fonts I disabled that were used in a test document were not turned back on when I opened the file again.

                Font Book preferences in Big Sur and Monterey                                        Font Book preferences in Ventura

Font Book preferences in Sonoma

Resetting Font Book’s database

At times, Font Book’s database can become corrupt. Usually from opening too many fonts, or fonts that are damaged. When you activate fonts with Font Book using the original method, not only are all fonts you’ve ever activated copied to the Fonts folder chosen in its preferences, but those fonts are also added as entries in its database (Library sets do not copy the fonts, but still do become entries in the database). Font Book uses this database to keep track of which fonts are active and which are not. The more there are, the longer it takes for your Mac to start up as Font Book must compare each font to the information in the database during startup to determine if a given font should be on or off. If the database becomes damaged, it can take a very long time for your Mac to start up to the desktop. If it’s really mangled, your Mac may not finish booting at all. Another symptom of a damaged database is not being able to activate or deactivate fonts from Font Book’s interface.

Manually removing fonts from your system will also ‘damage’ Font Book’s database, so to speak. Font Book does not correct itself when you manually remove fonts that are listed in its database; not even after a restart. It then contains links to non existent fonts which causes the program to behave in the same manner as a corrupt database. You’ll find that you cannot activate or deactivate certain fonts, or any at all.

To reset Font Book completely, do the following in the order listed. It takes the least amount of time and only two restarts.

1) Quit Font Book. Open the Preferences folder in your user account and put the following two files in the trash.

com.apple.FontBook.plist (does not exist in Ventura or later)

com.apple.FontRegistry.user.plist

The file com.apple.FontBook.plist keeps track of Font Book’s general preferences and activated fonts, whether as a standard or library collection. The file com.apple.FontRegistry.user.plist keeps track of deactivated fonts. Both may not be present. Delete what’s there.

2) Open Terminal and enter the following command (for Big Sur only):

sudo atsutil databases -remove

Enter your administrator password when prompted. Your password will not be visible as you type. This removes all font cache files maintained by macOS.

For Monterey or later, use this command:

atsutil databases -removeUser

This removes all font cache files of the currently logged in user account.

3) For Intel based Macs: Restart your Mac and immediately hold down the Shift key to boot into Safe Mode. Keep holding the Shift key until macOS asks you to log in to your user account (you will get this screen on a Safe Mode boot even if your Mac is set to automatically log in).

For Apple Silicon Macs: Shut the Mac down. Press and hold the power button. When the boot manager appears, you can release the power button and you’ll see the startup drives you can choose from. Press the Shift key and Safe Mode will appear under your choices. Continue holding the Shift key and double click the drive you want to startup to.

Then for either type of Mac, let it finish booting to the desktop and then restart normally. This will clear the remainder of Font Book’s database and the cache files for the user account you logged into in Safe Mode.

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I’ve used (or at least tested) every font manager mentioned in this article. To help you make a more informed choice as to which one you may want to use, I’m going to list the pros and cons of each one as I see them. These are not exhaustive reviews, but focus on the more common features or omissions that make a given font manager easier or harder to use. Reviewed here are the current versions available at the time of writing. Some features may not be available depending on the version you are using. They are; FontAgent 10.0, Font Book in macOS 14.x Sonoma, Connect Fonts (23.0.1), RightFont 8.0.2, Typeface 3.10 and FontBase 2.18.1.

If there is a font manager not mentioned here, it has either been discontinued (in which case I will remove the review), or is too simplistic to bother reviewing. A fair number of commercial font packages will include such basic font managers. They turn fonts on and off, and that’s pretty much it.

Generally, Type 1 PostScript fonts are limping along in Monterey and Ventura. You can still activate them with various third party font managers, but they appear as question marks, or blank boxes in many apps. The workaround is to manually place them in the Fonts folder of your user account. Though in Sonoma, even that doesn’t work. You must use a third party font manager. Or, read this article from the makers of Typeface for another option.

There’s also an issue where activating or deactivating a large number of fonts in Font Book, FontAgent, RightFont, FontBase and Connect Fonts cause TextEdit and Pages to freeze. The only solution was to force quit the frozen app and relaunch it. Typeface is the only tested font manager that does not cause this problem. Other apps with a font list may also be affected, but I tested the current managers mainly with these two apps. And this may be a Monterey/Ventura/Sonoma issue as they’re the only OS versions I tested these latest font manager versions under.

NOTE: It is no longer possible to disable any OS installed fonts in Ventura or Sonoma.

Connect Fonts

Pros:

1) Can create full sets that include font names already in other sets.

2) Can activate fonts in place. No need to create copies of the fonts you activate.

3) Has a reliable automatic font activation feature.

4) Font Sense technology virtually ensures auto activation will open the correct version of a font.

5) Lets you decide which font to activate or keep active when opening a conflicting font.

6) Has a vault option if you prefer to store copies of fonts that have been added.

7) Can control conflicting system fonts automatically.

8) Quickmatch feature helps you locate fonts which are similar to each other.

Cons:

1) Conflicting fonts cannot be acted upon individually.

FontAgent

Pros:

1) Copies all fonts you activate to a separate location in your user account. Therefore, even if you remove the original font or no longer have access to it, you can still activate the font from its working folder.

2) Can create full sets that include font names already in other sets.

3) Reliable automatic font activation.

4) Font Savant technology virtually ensures auto activation will open the correct version of a font. MagicMatch will give you close optional choices when the original isn’t available.

5) Includes Smasher.

6) Can disable all of the Supplemental folder fonts, or any combination of them you want.

Cons:

1) Fonts cannot be activated in place. Everything is copied to its working folder.

2) Does not inform you of a conflicting font that is already active in another set unless you’re using auto-activation.

FontBase

Pros:

1) Has a free version. “Awesome” version is a $3 per month subscription.

2) Can create font sets.

3) Can partially deactivate fonts in the Supplemental folder.

4) Fast at activating and deactivating even large numbers of fonts.

Cons:

1) Does not differentiate between identical fonts in separate sets.

2) Only understands OpenType and ancient 8 bit TrueType fonts.

3) All added fonts are copied to a working location.

Font Book

Pros:

1) It’s free.

2) Can create font sets.

3) Resolves font conflicts automatically.

4) Can create Library sets to open fonts in place.

Cons:

1) There is still one noticeable bug in the Sonoma version of Font Book that needs to be corrected. But otherwise, it’s actually now a pretty decent font manager.

RightFont

Pros:

1) Simple, straightforward interface. Even simpler than Font Book, which may appeal to novices.

2) Can disable all of the Supplemental folder fonts, or any combination of them you want (pre-Ventura).

Cons:

1) No method in RightFont to handle duplicate fonts.

Typeface

Pros:

1) Can create full sets that include font names already in other sets.

2) Activates all fonts in place. No copies are created.

3) Lets you decide which font to activate or keep active when opening a conflicting font.

4) Individual fonts in a suitcase can be activated or deactivated rather than all or nothing.

5) Can disable all of the Supplemental folder fonts, or any combination of them you want.

6) Very fast adding sets, and activating/deactivating fonts.

Cons:

1) None significant (in my opinion).

Font Book is included with macOS, so you can play around with it as much as you want. FontAgent has a version you can download and use as fully functional software for 30 days. Connect Fonts and Typeface have a 15 day trial period. Plenty of time to run them through the paces.

I consider full font sets a very big plus. When you have multiple projects going at once, you want to have a single set for each project that includes every font it uses, not just those that don’t already exist in another set. That makes your stop to your font manager a quick and painless process when you can simply turn off set three and turn on set ten. No need to search the other sets for fonts you still need activated. I also consider activating fonts in place a major plus. If you can activate a font right from where it is, why bother copying it to another folder as Font Book (standard set) and FontAgent insist on doing? The only advantage to that is if the fonts reside on removable media when you first activate them, so you may not have access to the originals later. But to avoid that, all you have to do is copy the fonts to your drive first. It’s not like they take up a lot of space.

Font Book in Big Sur through Sonoma allow you to open fonts in place by using Library sets. But there are still limitations to how you can add fonts. See below.

Here are my recommendations based on what I consider important.

Please note that some of these descriptions may not apply to the version of a given font manager you are using. Other than some older notes I leave for comparison, they are based on the versions which were current at the time of writing and may be a little, or drastically different from older versions.

1) Typeface: This font manager just keeps getting better, and in my opinion, easily earns the right to be first choice.

Typeface only takes 5 seconds to activate 2353 fonts. Less to deactivate. All fonts appear and disappear quickly in the apps I tested with.

Typeface handles duplicated fonts correctly. I imported two duplicate sets and activated one. Activating the other set prompted me to skip or replace. It also treats all new fonts as "in place". It doesn’t store copies anywhere, which I find far more intelligent than copying everything you add as Font Book, Connect Fonts and FontAgent insist upon doing.

It has a direct choice for Import > Supplemental System Fonts to make an easy set for those. Say goodbye to the 100 Noto Sans fonts and many others neither you or the OS need activated. You can deactivate all of the fonts in the Supplemental folder, or any individual ones you want (not applicable to Ventura or later).

Clicking on one font switches to a single view of that font. To prevent Typeface from doing that so you can select the individual fonts of a set to activate/deactivate, you can either hold down the Command key while choosing your fonts, or without a modifier key held down, move the cursor towards the lower right corner of a font. When you do that, a clipped area of that font’s window will appear. Click the icon that appears to select or deselect that font. You can skip around to any individual font to select or deselect them one at a time without affecting any previously marked fonts. Include the Shift key to select or deselect a range of adjacent fonts. Then right click on any marked font and choose to activate or deactivate.

You can also reverse the clicking action. Open Typeface’s settings. Under the General tab, change the top drop down menu to Click font to collect. What happens is clicking on larger area of a displayed font now selects or deselects it. The lower right corner becomes the font info button. Which way you want this to behave depends on which you do more often. Collect fonts, or to see a font’s information.

To add sets, chose Import > Fonts from Folder from the menu bar (or right click on the left column and make the same choice). You can also drag and drop into the main right hand window, or onto the left hand sidebar.

If you’re like me and have removed the Font Book set (which is initially the only set), the set section disappears. A fix in 3.5.2 allows you to always add sets to the sidebar, even if it’s empty. And you don’t have to worry about dropping a new folder of fonts into the currently shown font samples. You’ll still get another new set, as you expected.

Is it a simple app? Not at all. It’s nearly the equal to Connect Fonts with its feature set. And at only $37, it’s hard to go wrong with Typeface.

2) Connect Fonts: You may recall in my last review of Suitcase I had said it has become an app aimed mainly at large businesses. It couldn’t possibly be any more true now. How many individuals or small businesses do you know who will willingly spend $120 per year, per computer, for a font manager? Read on. It’s not quite as simple as price.

Connect Fonts is the new name for Suitcase. It’s also the name of the online page you can access. Along with this new font manager, Extensis also has Connect Assets, which is a cloud based DAM (Digital Asset Management) solution. Connect Fonts and Connect Assets are separate subscriptions. So no, you do not get Connect Fonts as part of that $300 per year fee for Connect Assets. Each person must have their own license for either. Have 30 seats that require asset access? Then it will cost your company $9,000 per year just for that. Add another $120 per year ($3,600 total) for each of those 30 seats to also have Connect Fonts.

You do not need to use the online portion of Connect Fonts. It can be a stand-alone font manager on your desktop the same as you’ve always done with Suitcase. Though you do need it to use all of the online font options. More recent versions of Suitcase can access the online Connect Fonts page, but your options are limited.

You can connect to your online font library at connect.extensis.com/login. Enter your Extensis ID and password. Or, from the Connect Fonts app, click the Open in Browser button at the top. Since you’re already signed in with the app, you automatically get logged in online.

When you go to the Connect Fonts web page, it initially says 1 of 5 seats used, with the person who logged into the account with the same credentials as the desktop app being the administrator. Click the Invite button towards the top right to add up to four other users who can access your online font repository. You can do this individually, or as a bulk addition. For each person you add, you can assign them as Administrator, License Manager, or User. Presuming you only want one person to handle the fonts for your team of 4 possible additions, you choose User. From there, you can give them access to Modify what’s in your online font repository, or Read Only. There’s also a check box that allows the user account to Collect For Output. Lastly, you choose which Font Libraries (Team Libraries/Sets) you want each person to be able to access. Click the Send Invite button and the recipient receives this pertinent information in an email from Extensis (live email links removed for the purpose of this article):

Let’s get started:

    1    Downloadand install Suitcase Fusion (the desktop client that pairs with Connect Fonts).

    2    Launch Suitcase Fusion.

    3    Login to Suitcase Fusion using your account credentials.

          If you’re new to Extensis, a user account has been created for you, and you’ve received a separate email with

          your temporary password.

    4    Login to Connect Fonts (use the same login credentials as Suitcase Fusion).

    5    Any shared Team libraries will display in the library panel on the left-hand side of the screen.

    6    Get creative.

When I clicked the link in step four, it then showed 2 of 5 seats used. Even though I was on the same computer, in the same browser, the server presumed I logged in from elsewhere as the test account from the email address I set up. And it did show this in the browser as two users logged into the page. Myself as Administrator, and the test account as Read Only. As long as everyone has their own Connect Fonts app, or a more recent version of Suitcase, you can share specified font libraries in a team of up to five.

A rather slick option is the fonts via your browser. I let it install the Safari plugin (Chrome, Edge and Firefox work without it) and chose to create a new set in the browser. You then upload your fonts for that set. It’s a nice option for users on the run to have access to their legal font library no matter where they are, without having the fonts directly on their laptop. From the web page, it acts just like your desktop font manager with buttons to activate or deactivate fonts. Though the Connect Fonts app on your Mac must be running when you do this. Otherwise, nothing happens. And while you can choose one of your older registered versions of Suitcase in the browser, you cannot activate or deactivate the fonts within it. Connect Fonts is the only one that will tie in. Otherwise, it does work as advertised. Fonts I activated in the browser appeared in Photoshop, TextEdit and Pages. Inkscape did not. But that’s a fault with the app itself. Inkscape will pay no attention to fonts activated in place. If your fonts are not directly in the user account Fonts folder, it doesn’t see them.

Who thinks the new Connect combo is worth this kind of money? In my opinion, it would only be the large business model mentioned earlier. Firms such as Nike, Apple, 3M, or any company who need employees working around the city, country or even worldwide to be able to access both files and fonts for various products in the works. And want those assets available to all without having to shuffle them around on an FTP or as email attachments. It’s all right there in your browser as if you were using a local server. And without Connect Assets, it’s still a way for one person to consolidate and manage the fonts for a project with up to four others having access to the project fonts, ensuring all involved personnel are using the exact same fonts.

Since this article is mainly about font management, let’s pretend Connect Assets doesn’t exist and focus on Connect Fonts. It’s a noticeable improvement over Suitcase. Activating 2,300 OpenType fonts takes about a minute. Same to deactivate that amount. Still slow compared to other choices listed here, but much faster than it used to be. If you’re activating or deactivating a couple of hundred fonts, Pages and TextEdit will momentarily stall, but then work normally when Connect Fonts is done with the process. But like some of the other font managers noted here, if you try to activate/deactivate a couple of thousand fonts, Pages and TextEdit will just plain ol’ freeze. You’ll have to Force Quit and relaunch them.

During the initial setup of Connect Fonts you first choose if you want all new fonts added to the Vault, or used in place (original location). Which like before in Suitcase is really no choice at all since it adds all of the fonts you activate to the Vault anyway, and then removes them when deactivated. This first screen also gives you a choice of whether or not to enable Google Fonts in the interface.

Next, you choose which plug-ins you want active. All of the main Adobe suite apps are there, including the retired Adobe Sketch, but not Quark XPress or anything else outside of Adobe. Following that are boxes to check for updates automatically and whether or not to share system profile information with Extensis.

Lastly, you can choose to deactivate all non-required system fonts. Which means Connect Fonts can now control the Supplemental folder fonts like pretty much every other third party font manager. It doesn’t matter if you skip this choice since you can still turn these fonts on or off in the main interface afterwards anytime you want. This final setup screen also gives you an option to clean the font caches to end the setup routine.

As a basic judgement, Connect Fonts is a quite a bit of an improvement over Suitcase. And you don’t need Connect Assets in order to use the remote server option in a browser for your fonts. I just don’t know how many people Extensis believes are going to willingly part with $120 per year for a font manager. For a group routinely involved in team managed products, they will probably find value in it. Even though each individual user has to have their own copy of Connect Fonts, or Suitcase if that user is always only accessing fonts made available by the administrator of the online account.

However, let’s face a basic fact. You can get by without any font manager at all, including Font Book, by manually putting fonts into the Fonts folder of your user account to activate them, and take them out to deactivate. The benefit of a good font manager is it makes this chore much easier and more organized. But unless you truly see value in the browser option, which you don’t need at all if you’re using a desktop computer, or if you always have all of your fonts on the device you carry with you anyway, I don’t see any reason to spend this much money per year for a single user font manager when there are equally good choices for far less.

3) Font Book: Font Book in Ventura had gotten a major makeover with many improvements. Most - okay - all greatly overdue. Because it is so different, I’ve removed all references to older versions. If you need, or want to read information on Font Book relevant to the versions in Monterey or earlier, please refer to the old article links at the top of the page. And now in Sonoma, the new Font Book’s many bugs have nearly all been eradicated.

What works: Collections now work as they should. You add your fonts and they appear in the right hand pane just as you would expect, unlike in Ventura where you’d find yourself looking at a blank page with Font Book insisting you hadn’t added any fonts yet.

There is a slight trick to properly removing your collections so the fonts go along with it. It’s just a few easy steps, but must be done in the correct order for it to work.

The proper way to remove a collection in Font Book, assuming you don’t mind the related fonts being deleted.

1. Disable the set.

2. Right click on the set name in the left column and choose Delete.

3. Font Book will jump to the All Fonts heading with the fonts that were in the removed set all automatically highlighted. Right click on any highlighted font and choose Remove. The fonts will be removed from Font Book’s list and the actual fonts in the user account Fonts folder will be deleted.

That last step was a nice little feature Apple added to Font Book. No more manual hunting to remove the associated fonts for a set you just deleted. As long as you do it immediately that is, while the fonts are still pre-selected for you.

What doesn’t work: The steps are the same to remove a Library set, but it doesn’t work correctly at the end. More precisely it appears to, but when you relaunch Font Book, the fonts you think you just removed all appear again under All Fonts, and they’re all highlighted again. It doesn’t matter how many times you try to remove the entries, they keep coming back. The only way to get rid of them is to go into Font Book’s settings and do a reset. But that of course removes all of your libraries and collections. Something most users would like to avoid.

Until Apple fixes this bug when removing a Library, the safe play is to always use Collections.

How does this new version handle duplicates? I created two new Collections. I then added my five test fonts to one, and a duplicate set from another folder to the other. Font Book asked for each font if I wanted to Keep Both, Skip, or Replace. The first two are self explanatory. If you choose Replace, the duplicate fonts are moved to the Fonts (Removed) folder of the user account. The folder will be created if it doesn’t already exist. I let it keep both on all five fonts. What does FB do? It copies the same fonts to your user account with a 2 after the name. So I now had 10 fonts in my Fonts folder. 

When you have duplicate fonts in various Collections or Libraries, whichever set you added last are the ones that are enabled. Activating a conflicting font in another set automatically deactivates the duplicate. This is actually nice since you can now have same-named fonts installed without the worry of font conflicts. Activate the ones you want, and any conflicting font is turned off for you.

As you may have guessed by now, the old Font Conflict resolution screen is gone. There was no longer a need for it since Font Book automatically deactivates any fonts that conflict with one you just activated. The user doesn’t have to pay attention to this.

It no longer takes over an hour to import a large number of fonts. I tested both a collection and a library of 2,300 OpenType fonts. It took something less than a minute for Font Book to import the fonts. It also pretty quickly activates or deactivates them.

Yes, I’m going to say it. Font Book is now a pretty decent font manager. The fact that it won’t let you enable conflicting fonts without so much as a warning per the way FontAgent functions, I’d trust Font Book in a commercial environment before FontAgent.

Once Apple fixes the bug of never removing fonts from the All Fonts list that were connected to any Library, it really will be a quite usable font manager.

4) FontAgent: Auto activation is very reliable. Stable program that rarely crashes. Copies all activated fonts to another location, which I don’t find necessary. FontAgent 10 uses Sets, similar to Connect Fonts and other font managers listed here. Much less confusing to have it behave the same as its competitors. Version 10 carries on with the well designed interface introduced in version 7.

You can now add a set for the Supplemental fonts folder. And even though FontAgent is managing copies of these fonts in your user account, which would all technically conflict with those in the

/System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/ folder, it still manages to disable or enable any of them you wish.

That’s the good news. For professionals, it’s still a dangerous font manager to use. The one main issue I’ve mentioned for previous versions is still its greatest downfall. And that’s being able to activate multiple, conflicting fonts without the user ever once being informed by the app. And even that isn’t consistent. There’s only a preference to inform you of conflicts through auto-activation. Any sets you manually turn on that produce a conflict tells you nothing. As in earlier versions, if you have duplicate fonts in multiple sets, they all shown green (activated) when you turn any one of them on. I’ve long wondered, is FontAgent simply being smart enough to recognize the fonts are identical? So I tested it to find out.

As with all previous versions, FontAgent creates a repository in your user account of every font you add, saving its own copies of all of them. This time, I took a font and intentionally stripped a bunch of glyphs out of it and saved a copy to the same name. All internal names were the same, and since the fonts were now physically different, it should produce a conflict error. At least, that’s what you’d think.

If the fonts are truly identical, then no matter how many times you add the same duplicated font in different sets, FontAgent keeps one copy of the font, and one only, in your user account. So yes, it does realize they are 100% identical, which is why every single instance of a given font turns green when you activate it in any entry. So far so good, since that makes sense, once you understand why it’s doing that. Next, I added an unmodified font in one set, and then the modified version in another set. Turning one or the other on does not turn both green. Yes, again. FontAgent realizes they are not identical and has copies of both in the user account.

This all sounds logical and good. Right up until you turn one font on, and then the other. At this point, FontAgent simply should not let you do that. But you get no notice you’ve turned on not just a conflicting font, but a physically different one. Clicking on each one in the interface does show a preview for each "active" font in the bottom pane. And since I really hacked the modified one, it’s clear glyphs are missing. So it should be impossible for both to be active.

In your apps, as you would expect, only one instance of that font name appears in the menus. Which one do you get? Since you now have a font conflict, it’s essentially random. Sometimes the first font you activated is the one used, and other times it’s the second one. So we have the same issue as previous versions. You could end up using the wrong version of a client supplied font, which could result in the loss of hundreds, or thousands of dollars at your company’s expense.

If you remove any fonts or sets from the interface, FontAgent will also delete the related fonts from its storage location in your user account. You don’t get a choice of whether or not the fonts are removed.

FontAgent’s Font Savant technology, which is similar to Connect Fonts’ Font Sense, makes FontAgent a strong contender. Having auto activation open exactly the same fonts as before is extremely important in a production environment, saving you from both lost time and income because the wrong version was used. When the original font cannot be found, MagicMatch will show you the closest alternative it can find.

It’s also still slow. About 2 minutes to open or close 2312 fonts. Far better than the 20 minutes it took before to do the same thing, but it simply shouldn’t take this long. Like other managers I had this issue with under Monterey, Pages and TextEdit froze after activating or deactivating these test fonts, and they wouldn’t all appear in other apps.

Overall, FontAgent 10 is a very good font manager, but its biggest failure is that it may not warn you that a conflicting font you’ve turned on isn’t the one previously used in a document. This can be a tremendously costly error in production.

5) RightFont: Nice looking, and an improved font manager.

Version 7 and now also version 8 are a step backwards. In version 6 when activating/deactivating 2300 fonts, Pages and TextEdit were only unresponsive until RightFont was done activating/deactivating a large number of fonts. Now it’s back to what would happen in version 5. The apps freeze during activation or deactivation of a large number of fonts. Instead of being usable again after RightFont is done (per version 6), TextEdit and Pages remain completely frozen and a force quit is your only way out.

With no existing sets, dragging and dropping a folder of fonts, or individual fonts into version 8’s interface does nothing. If you have any sets created and drop fonts into the right hand pane, they get added to whatever user created set is highlighted in the left hand column. If none or your created sets is highlighted, dragging and dropping does nothing. In order to keep fonts separated, you have to create a set folder first, then import the fonts you want within it.

Version 8 has done away with the monolithic database. Every time you create a new library (set), it’s saved as its own database by the name you give it. I created a set with a Britannic Bold font from OS 9, and the other with Britannic Bold from Office 365. They have completely identical internal names, and so 100% conflict with each other. Yet, RightTouch 8 let me activate both, which isn’t really possible. No warnings of any conflicts whatsoever. Britannic Bold then listed in the apps I was testing with, but which one are you looking at? Is RightFont actually activating the conflicting font and just not telling you? I deactivated the second version and the font disappeared from the font lists, despite the other version still being marked as active.

What that tells me is RightFont 8 is deactivating the previously activated font without changing its visual status. This is what the new version of Font Book also does. When you activate a conflicting font, it automatically disables the version that was already active. But at least in Font Book, the previously active version does not continue to be marked as active. It would make much more sense to the user if RightFont would mark the font it superseded as disabled.

Overall, the good news in version 8 is you can have separate sets containing fonts with the same name. That is a welcome change. When you delete a set, the associated database is removed from the drive.

You can’t choose a set (Font Libraries) name to enable or disable everything in a set at once. You must select the fonts within a set in the right hand pane. In a slightly odd way of working, if you click anywhere on a blank area of the right hand pane between the font names and press Command+A to select all fonts in a set, the Activate and Deactivate menu choices remain grayed out as if you haven’t selected anything. You must first click on an actual font name, then Command+A to make the menu choices active.

Font families are initially displayed as as single entry. To selectively enable or disable specific faces in a family, double click the number next to the font name. Double click the base name above an expanded set to collapse it back down to a single entry.

RightFont supports automatic font activation for apps it recognizes on your system. You can turn this off if you wish.

Version 8 includes a large selection of black and white icons. These are shown from various fonts within the application package. You can drag them from RightFont’s interface into most image or text editing apps where they become placed art. Dragged to the desktop, they become stand-alone .svg vector files. Because they’re vector art, they’re infinitely scalable with no loss of quality.

RightFont still handles Type 1 PostScript and legacy OS 9 TrueType fonts, though these font types are going to be history in the short term. In two examples, the current releases of the Adobe CC suite, and the newly released 2024 SoftMaker Office suite will pay no attention to T1 PS fonts.

RightFont 8 can properly disable all fonts in the Supplemental folder (or any number of them you wish). Do that by clicking on the System Fonts heading. A concatenated list of the System’s Fonts folder, and Fonts/Supplemental folder will be displayed. Click on any font and press Command+A to select all. Then right click on any font and choose Deactivate. When finished, all of the Supplemental folder fonts will be disabled. Those in the main /System/Library/Fonts/ folder won’t be since no font manager can control those. You’re free to disable or enable any number of fonts in the Supplemental folder.

In Ventura or Sonoma, RightFont will go through all the motions of disabling the Supplemental fonts. It will even show the fonts as disabled. In reality, RightFont didn’t do anything since you cannot turn any Ventura or Sonoma OS installed fonts off.

Clicking on the expansion arrow next to System Fonts reveals the active user account name, All Users and System. Choosing System shows you only the fonts in the /System/Library/Fonts/ folder. It’s a rather pointless heading since you can’t do anything with these fonts anyway.

It took RightFont 40 seconds to activate 2,312 OpenType fonts, and as long to deactivate them. Quite an improvement in speed over version 6.

RightFont is now a pretty decent font manager. The freezing issue isn’t much to be concerned about since, really, how many people attempt to activate over 2,000 fonts at a time? That it appears to automatically disable conflicting fonts in other sets is also nice. But it needs to do a better job conveying that to the user.

6) FontBase (free version): Meant to be used only with OpenType fonts. It will let you import Dfonts, Type 1 PostScript and OS 9 legacy TrueType, but it will not activate them. On a bit of a strange note, it has no issue handling ancient 8 bit Windows TrueType fonts.

FontBase does not pay attention to duplicate fonts. If you bring in two identical sets it will show both, but activating one set does the same to both. It shouldn’t do that. Only the set you chose should activate. The other set should be flagged as duplicates if you try to activate it.

It defaults to adding over 3000 Google fonts as a set. Delete that set if you don’t care about cloud fonts.

FontBase doesn’t even bother to show you the system fonts, but you can add the Supplemental folder as a set. You can then deactivate these fonts. However, it doesn’t work properly. If for example you disable the entire set, a lot of these fonts do disappear from your font lists, but not all of them. It does at least kill those annoying Noto Sans fonts. So, FontBase gets a partial pat on the head for doing a partial job.

On the plus side, it’s incredibly fast. 2300 fonts activated or deactivated in just 2 or 3 seconds! It takes just a bit longer to first create a set since every single font you add is copied to your user account at /Users/your_account/FontBase with a subfolder for every set you create, giving each subfolder the same name as the set. Fortunately, fonts don’t take up a lot of space. Still, it would be nice if it would skip this function entirely and just handle fonts where they are. That it makes full copies of the Supplemental folder fonts is likely why it doesn’t succeed in deactivating all of them. It’s trying to handle what are then all conflicting copies while the OS tries to hold the original fonts open.

When you remove a set, it drops the copied fonts into the trash.

FontBase has become a fairly decent app. Especially for free. You just have to be aware it only handles OpenType and old 8 bit TrueType fonts, and that it will continually pester you to upgrade to the paid version at a $3 per month subscription. But the speed is amazing, even though it’s making copies of everything you add to the interface.

Type 1 PostScript fonts no longer work in Photoshop CC. In January of 2023, InDesign and Illustrator followed suit. Legacy Mac TrueType will likely be next. Because these font types are on the way out, it somewhat no longer matters that FontBase only works with OpenType, or old 8 bit TrueType fonts.

Does FontBase work? Yes, for what it does. Would I would recommend to professionals? No. It’s a very minimalist manager with nowhere near enough features to be used in a production environment.

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All types of software create and maintain cache files. The purpose of a cache file is to access frequently used data faster than it can usually be obtained from its original location. Since we’re talking about fonts, we’ll use them as an example. Any font activation causes the OS to create cached data of those fonts. This data is optimized for both faster retrieval and rendering; much faster than it would be to access the fonts themselves every time a call is made to draw a font to the screen. If over time you use a particular font less, even though it’s active, the cached data for that font may eventually be removed from the cache in favor of those being used more frequently. If you use the font again, its data will be added back into the cache in the assumption that the data will once again be needed more often. Hence, cache data is something that is always in flux whether it’s font data, data for the OS itself or any other program that use various types of caches.

Because that data is read from and written to so often, the data is bound to have errors introduced at some time. When that happens, you see odd problems. With fonts, it’s almost always garbled text caused by corrupt font caches.

Utilities you can use to clear your font caches are Cocktail and OnyX. These are powerful utilities which can do far more than just cleaning font caches. If you are not familiar with these applications, then I would caution you in their use as you could cause your Mac to become non functional, requiring a reinstall of the OS.

Connect Fonts and Typeface include their own cache cleaning tools. With Connect Fonts in the foreground, the option is under File > Clean Font Caches. This is a very thorough cleaning. It clears the the OS font cache files, and those for many third party apps which maintain their own separate font cache files.

Using Typeface, shut down Typeface and all other apps. Hold the Option key and launch Typeface. Instead of the normal interface, you’ll get a list of choices. Click Clear Font Cache. You’ll then see an alert of what will occur. Click the Clear cache button. Enter your admin password to allow osascript to run (this is an OS installed Unix app). Then click the restart button.

Notes on cache files:

There is a right way and a wrong way to remove cache files. Typeface, Connect Fonts and OnyX force you to do it the right way by restarting immediately afterwards. So why is this right? As just noted, cache files are accessed frequently. If you remove any type of cache file and attempt to continue working, you could easily have just pulled the rug out from under an application that was reading (or worse, writing) to a cache file that was removed during the cache cleaning operation. The consequences can be anywhere from minor to disaster. The rules for clearing cache files are simple, but need to be followed to avoid potential data loss.

1) Quit all running applications. This is not optional - do it. While it doesn’t hurt to leave your font manager running, as long as it’s in a static state (not actively being used in any way), the only ’program’ running should be the OS itself. If you want to really be certain, shut down your font manager, too.

2) Use either of the utilities linked to in this section to remove the font cache files (Connect Fonts and Typeface can also remove font cache data using an option within the application). If the program you use does not automatically force a restart, don’t take that to mean it’s okay to continue working. Restart your Mac immediately. Under no circumstances should you ever skip restarting after manually removing any type of cache data.

Office 2019, 2021 and 365 do not appear to maintain their own cache. A restart is required after you clear font cache.

In Big Sur, you can also remove font cache files using the Terminal application.

Close all running applications. From an administrator account, open the Terminal app and enter the following command (or copy/paste it from here):

sudo atsutil databases -remove

Enter your administrator password when prompted.

This removes all font cache files maintained by macOS. Both for the system and the active user account. After running the command, close Terminal and immediately restart your Mac.

As of Monterey, this has changed. After conversing with a developer over the period of about a week, we figured out (or, we’re pretty sure) what’s going on with the font cache in Monterey and later.

The Terminal command – sudo atsutil databases -remove – now returns an error message when trying to use it in Monterey or later. This is because the user no longer has any control over the system’s font cache. System fonts and their associated cache are located in a read-only part of the drive and cannot be changed by the user. Only the OS itself can access them. Therefore, clearing the system font cache is not necessary and can be static (this is our assumption). 

Only macOS may change the system fonts in OS updates. When that happens, the system cache files should be updated accordingly as a new cache would then be required as part of the update. You could see that in the 12.3 update, which at minimum updated the Emoji font. Whatever day you apply that update on, all fonts in the System folder will be tagged with that date (no matter how many actually changed), and contents of the system’s cache file at

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/ATS.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ReadOnlyDB/ will have the same date. The 12.3.1 update didn’t alter the font cache, or timestamps of the system’s fonts. That’s a pretty good hint no fonts were updated in that point release.

For Monterey users, and presumably from here forward, you would use this Terminal command to clear only the user font cache:

atsutil databases -removeUser

This is the same folder Typeface, Connect Fonts and other tools clear in Monterey when you use their font cache cleaning function. You then must restart before the OS will build a new cache.

If you have no font manager or other app that has a font cache clearing option and prefer not to use Terminal, then the simplest way to do this is to restart the Mac into Safe Mode, and then restart normally.

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If at any point you want to reinstall the OS supplied fonts, the only way to do that is to reinstall the entire OS. It’s mostly a last resort option.

Q: "The fonts in Safari and many other applications are a garbled mess, or Safari and other applications won’t launch."

A: A common cause of applications not starting are corrupt fonts, or sometimes (though rarely) even a corrupt font cache. See the previous section on how to clear the user font cache.

Q: "What in the world is with a question mark in a box?"

A: Are you seeing a strings of characters like this where there should be text in your web browser, email or other app?

The most common causes are that your font cache data is damaged, or you’ve turned on conflicting fonts. When either happens, the OS opts for the last resort to display something, anything there. Appropriately, this text is from the system font LastResort. Usually, for corrupt cache data, all you have to do is restart your Mac. If that doesn’t do it, then clear the font cache files from the system using Terminal, as described at the bottom of the previous section. If the problem appeared after enabling some new fonts, turn them back off and see if the problem corrects itself. If neither helps, you may need to reinstall the OS.

Yosemite was the last time the boxed A was used. There was quite a variety of boxed glyphs in the LastResort font then. In El Capitan and later, Apple threw almost all of them out. The main glyph used to signify a missing font now is a boxed question mark.

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