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 13.x Ventura, Connect Fonts (23.0.1), RightFont 8.0.2, Typeface 3.8.2 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. 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 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.

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 are some very noticeable bugs that need to be corrected in this rebuilt version of Font Book. See the review below. Update: Appears to affect only certain types of Mac hardware.

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 and Ventura 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: What a difference in the current 3.8.2! It is now so much better than the 2.3 version I first tested, this font manager, in my opinion, easily earns the right to be first choice.

Typeface is vastly improved from the first time I reviewed this font manager. 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 now 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.

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 and the SoftMaker Office suite did not. But that’s a fault with the apps themselves. Neither will pay any attention to fonts activated in place. If they’re not directly in the user account Fonts folder, the apps don’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 actually 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 has 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.

Font Book has been pretty much rewritten as a new app. Virtually all of the old issues are gone.

May 29, 2023 update: The issues I’m seeing with Font Book in Ventura seem to be random. Some users see the same things I do, and others don’t. With a new M2 mini in hand, I was hoping it would prove the issue had something to do with the Intel 2018 mini. Unfortunately, there’s no change on my end.

I was in a long conversation on Apple’s forums about this. The main proof is my December 16th, 2022 post. Two entirely different Macs with the same results, despite the proof from the other user showing collections working as they should. So if you have read this review previously and wondered, “What in the world is he talking about?”, then bear in mind you may see the following issues with collections, or you may not.

If you create a new collection, you can add fonts to it, but any collections you create tells you there are no fonts in them. In order to see the fonts you added at all, you have to click on the My Fonts, or All Fonts headings. Even though Font Book recognizes the fonts have been added under other headings, and the fonts are indeed in the Fonts folder of your user account, the collection itself is useless. You cannot enable or disable fonts from any of your new collections since Font Book insists they’re empty.

It gets clumsier. If you delete an "empty" collection, the fonts you added to it remain trapped under the All Fonts and My Fonts headings. Makes sense in a way since the fonts are still in your user account. But what if you don’t want them listed? Your only choice is to remove them from under the My Fonts heading. Then, whether they’re enabled or not, they finally clear from the All Fonts list and the fonts are deleted from the user account Fonts folder.

Libraries are worse. After resetting Font Book, I created a new library and added the same five fonts. One appeared and was activated (the default). The other four wouldn’t appear until I shut down FB and relaunched it. The others were then listed, but not active. This is somewhat random. I repeated the process after resetting FB and the next time, none of the fonts appeared under the library until I shut down FB and relaunched. In all cases, since library fonts are links and not actual copies of the fonts in your user account Fonts folder, they appear under All Fonts, but not My Fonts.

The next fun part is trying to get rid of these entries. It’s easy enough to remove some or all of the fonts in a library set, or the entire library. But no matter how you do it, those fonts are permanently listed under All Fonts. How do you clear them? You can’t! If you delete the actual fonts the links point to, Font Book still clings to the entries. Except, now they’re all marked with big question marks and labeled as .LastResort. The only fix either way is to use the Reset Fonts button under Settings. But that of course removes all of your libraries and collections. You’d like to believe it would at least be easier to remove the dead entires from the All Fonts list since the .LastResort entries all collect at the top. But no, you can’t do anything with them at all.

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.

The problem remains that your collections are blank and you have to go to the My Fonts or All Fonts folder to activate or deactivate the fonts. You have to click the expansion arrow by each name to see there are now two choices for each of the installed, duplicate fonts. Whichever set you added last are the ones that are enabled. Activating the opposite font 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. This would all be great, if you could use the collections you create. But since they all display as empty, you have to very annoyingly handle them in the My Fonts folder.

If you want to remove your collection set fonts, you would supposedly remove the collection name(s). Which you may as well do anyway immediately after importing your fonts since they list as empty. Instead, you have to go to the My Fonts heading and chose which fonts to remove. The fonts will then be correctly removed from the user account Fonts folder.

Libraries at least do this part right and work the way you would expect, as far as what appears in Font Book. Using the same two folders of duplicate fonts, I created two new libraries and imported a folder into each set. As noted above, the imported fonts names wouldn’t appear until I shut FB down and relaunched it. After that, you can activate one library (or selected fonts within one), and the duplicates in any other library will automatically be deactivated. As with collections, you can now have fonts with identical names in each library.

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.

On a brighter point, 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 actually 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 collections bug of refusing to show any fonts you’ve added, and the libraries 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, 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 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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