Font book keeps enabling ALL of my fonts - Overloading my system

When I restart my computer or just Font Book, Font Book enables ALL of my fonts. I have over 1100 fonts. It eats up all of my RAM (3GB) and the computer grinds to a slow crawl. I have deselected "automatic font activation" in preferences. I have created "collections" so I can activate and de-activate groups and manage the many fonts. I can even go through EVERY non-system font and manually deactivate them. But they will all activate at restart. I have been having this problem for years with ALL versions of Font Book from day 1. I am now on OSX Lion with Font Book 3.0. Same problem. Yet I see few posts about other s dealing with this. What's could be causing FB to open all fonts?
Is there a fix for this? Is Font Book worth the trouble? I have known people (also with large font collections) who claim it works fine for them. If not, how do I bring in new font managment software and shut down Font Book to avoid any conflicts?

Don't count on Font Book to help you at this point. With a lot of bad fonts on the system before, it's now likely that its database is hosed. When that happens, Font Book does all kinds of strange things. Like not being able to activate or deactivate fonts that are in its list.
To straighten things out, do this:
1) Go directly to the following folders, not through Font Book. Delete all fonts in the /Library/Fonts/ folder. Delete all fonts in the Fonts folder of your user account.
2 Restart the Mac and hold down the Shift key to start up in Safe Mode. This takes awhile as the OS is doing multiple checks. For your particular needs, it also clears all cache files from your user account and trashes Font Book's current database.
3) When the Safe Mode startup is done, your Mac will be at what looks like your normal desktop. Restart again normally.
4) Follow the directions at the bottom of the article ~Bee linked to in order to restore just the fonts from the Snow Leopard installation disk.

Similar Messages

Font Book - after 10.5.2 update, font has no preview and doesn't work

Help me, this problem is driving me crazy!
I've done a clean install of Leopard 10.5.0 on my MacBook Pro, on an external firewire drive (I want to keep my Tiger install as is at the momement). I install the adobe postscript Type 1 font Carta, which is a map symbol font, in Font Book. Font Book shows the preview of the font, which looks fine. I download a fresh 10.5.2 update and install it, restart. Now in Font Book, no preview of the Carta font, the preview window is blank, or it shows whichever font was displayed before, ie if I click on Arial then on Carta, the preview of Arial remains. Double clicking on the font itself opens Font Book main window, but no preview. The Opentype version of this font does exactly the same thing. Font Book validates the fonts as being okay.
When it comes to applications, Word 2004 will display the font, but character spacing is all over the place. Indesign CS3 will display the first 96 characters correctly, but after that it puts in a 'missing font' highlighted space. Opening the font with Linotype FontXplorer, the preview shows the font, though it seems to be missing the 'Z' and 'z'. Character Palette shows all glyphs in the font correctly, but double clicking on any above the first 96 puts in a 'missing font' space in Indesign. The trouble is the characters I need to use are all above this point in the font! Basically, it seems that the OS update has changed the font mapping.
The Font Book preview problem doesn't just happen to Carta, it seems to happen on a number of other fonts, mostly symbol fonts, some that I've created using Fontographer. All work perfectly in OS9 and 10.4.11. Even more annoyingly, other colleagues with different Macs on 10.5.2 are having no problems. I have done all the usual voodoo of deleting font caches, rebuilding permissions, even gone back to the font CDs to get the originals, reinstalled, etc.
I have installed Leopard from 2 different DVDs, on two different intel machines (a MacBook Pro and a Mac Pro), and swapped the Firewire drive onto a G4 (I installed it so it would boot both the G4 and the MBP), and always the same result. I'm going to install an HD internally on the G4, install Leopard and see if the same thing happens.
Anybody got any useful suggestions?

I'm slowly getting to a solution, or at least a reason, for this problem. It seems that Leopard has tighter requirements on fonts for the languages they support. The Carta info in Tiger looks like this:
!http://www.biscuit.demon.co.uk/carta/cartainfotiger.gif!
Whereas under Leopard it says:
!http://www.biscuit.demon.co.uk/carta/cartainfoleo.gif!
Indonesian as the language under Leopard?! All the other fonts that I have problems with generally have NO language when I look at the info panel under Leopard AND Tiger. But Tiger seems to cope with them with my language set to British English. At least this may explain why the character encoding goes a bit crazy under Leopard.
Out of a peculiar sort of masochistic interest, I went through all of the default languages, plus a few others, that Leopard installs, seeing the effect of changing the language on the Font Book preview. I should just say that the Font Book Repertoire is always the same for all the languages, and the same info is displayed each time too. I'm now convinced it's the character mapping that changes when different languages are selected as the default.
Font Book Repertoire:
!http://www.biscuit.demon.co.uk/carta/cartaenglishrep.gif!
All the following languages displayed the preview correctly: English, Francais, Deutsch, Espanol, Italiano, Portugues, Svenska, Norsk Bokmal, Dansk, Suomi.
The preview looked like this:
!http://www.biscuit.demon.co.uk/carta/carta_english.gif!
The following languages showed the same behaviour as British English, in that NO preview showed, it would display the font preview of the previously selected font: Portugues (Portugal), Austalian English, Canadian English, US English, Espanol (Espana)
Changing to languages with different alphabets tended to show different things. Not sure if I've correctly identified the languages.
The two Chinese (I think) languages - AaBbCc characters only
Japanese (I think) - a to m, A to M, numbers 1 to 0
Korean (I think) - two arrows usually mapped to singe and double quotation marks, and ABcdEFgh 1234567890 - see this image:
!http://www.biscuit.demon.co.uk/carta/carta_korean.gif!
Russian (I think) - 1234567890 ("*#%&@`)
Polski - This produced the most, dropping several characters from the main alphabet, but adding a load that usually map to ("*%&') - see below:
!http://www.biscuit.demon.co.uk/carta/carta_polski.gif!
This all means that I have to stick with "English" as my Language, rather than "British English". I have yet to reinstall CS3, but I'll do this without changing the language, and hopefully CS3 with get the encoding correct.
Questions? Comments? Sorry about all the images.

HT2509 I have installed a font from the internet into Font Book and saved it in my Fonts folder under my user library. How can I make it available in Word to type a document?

I have installed a font from the internet into Font Book and saved it in my Fonts folder under my user library. How can I make it available in Word to type a document?

Font Management in OS X

Font Book on/off is confused (thinking fonts are off when they are on)

So my Font Book activates and deactivates font properly and other apps react accordingly.
Problem is the On/Off label next to each font inside Font Book. Font Book is completely ignoring the correct statues of each font. So it is stuck on a specific label. If a font is deactivated, and I try to activate, it works fine, BUT the label is stuck displaying 'OFF' instead of turning into 'ON'.
This seemed like a small issue, until i needed to deactivate a font that says 'OFF'! now I am stuck, since right clicking on it says 'Activate family' while it should say 'Deactive family'! Font book thinks its deactivated while in reality its activated!
i can activate but not deactivate since the labels are wrong and font book is confused!
Here are the things that i already tried: restart, check for damaged fonts, repair permissions, run iTools, run disk utility, deleting font book preferences.
Only thing that I have not tried is deleting all fonts, rebooting font book and doing everything again. (i have around 3100 fonts)
how do i resolve this? anyone else encountering this problem?

so after much research, trial and errors and several backups later:
Trashed the fb.db file in my ~Users > Gaith > Library > Application Support > Font Book folder.

FONT BOOK 2.0.2 - Problems installing fonts

I am having problems loading fonts into Font Book 2.0.2 - I have been using Font Book 1.0.2 on two other macs and have had no problems loading any fonts. Using my new Mac (OS X 10.4.3) with the latest version of Font Book is proving to be very problematic as fonts such as INTERSTATE just will not load into the software.
Does Font Book 2.0.2 not work with some fonts that do work in previous versions of the software?...
Do you have to run OS Classic for some fonts to work in Font Book...?
Very fustrating..! - Thanks in advance to anybody for their help with this.
Dancho
i Mac G5 (Dec 05) Mac OS X (10.4.3)

I am having problems loading fonts into Font Book 2.0.2 - I have been using Font Book 1.0.2 on two other macs and have had no problems loading any fonts. Using my new Mac (OS X 10.4.3) with the latest version of Font Book is proving to be very problematic as fonts such as INTERSTATE just will not load into the software.
Does Font Book 2.0.2 not work with some fonts that do work in previous versions of the software?...
Do you have to run OS Classic for some fonts to work in Font Book...?
Very fustrating..! - Thanks in advance to anybody for their help with this.
Dancho
i Mac G5 (Dec 05) Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Font Book crashes when trying to remove corrupt fonts

I have recently upgraded to Snow Leopard and am having problems with my fonts.
After installing some of my previously used fonts, some of them didn't pass validation. I don't mind removing them - I barely use 1% of the fonts I have, but when I run Font Validation in Font Book and then select all the corrupt files and click "Remove" - Font Book just gets stuck.
Then I went by the list and removed MANUALLY all the invalid font files (the ones with the red cross sign).
Then only the minor warnings remained , but even when I try to remove them with Font Book - it still crashes.
It's ridiculous to remove them manually one by one, cause I have a huge collection of 1000s of fonts and there are more than 500 corrupt fonts there. I'm not using many fonts, but I want to keep my library up and working, so I want to get rid of everything that might cause problems...
Any help?

Hi Kurt
Sorry, was busy, didn't answer for some time. Thanks - it helped me to run Font Book again and install new fonts, but Font Book is still causing me a lot of trouble - never had so much in Leopard - I'm frustrated, maybe you can help on those:
After completely wiping clean all my fonts databases and folders etc. I've started loading back my Font libraries into Font Book. I don't copy fonts to any new folder, I just activate them from wherever they are without copying. First thing I noticed, is the amount of "corrupt" fonts has increased enormously - I have a couple of folders with alsmot all 400-500 fonts corrupt (yellow sign) with this error message: 'kern' table structure and contents. All of them with the same Error message.
The next thing that happened, is that at some point Font Book has just deleted my new font libraries again without any notice. Then I installed them back again. It deleted them again (I think after a restart).
Another bug is that Font Book always activates all the new fonts upon loading them, although I clearly runed off "Automatic fonts activation" in the Preferences. So every time I load a library I manually disable all of the fonts, and then enable only the ones I use.
BUT! What happens next, is completely outrageous - when I launched FB next time, all my new font libraries where activated again! jezus - I had to go and disable them all and again activate the ones I need. This repeated several times, until I decided to delete the fontbook.plist prefs file from Preferences. I think it helped for now, but I'm not sure yet - will wait and see.
Also there is a bug in FB, that when I install a new library, it always jumps my cursor into renaming the name of this library, and doesn't let me navigate the fonts with keyboard, unless I restart. This is an obvious bug.
And the last thing that happened is that I cannot type my Baltic languages fonts anymore - the input of the keyboard is completely wrong. Those are TrueType fonts, and most of them worked perfectly in Leopard with InDesign. Now when I type the baltic letters in InDesign I see squares. But when I open Glyphs - I see all those letters and need to put them in manually from Glyphs panel. This is totally frustrating and I cannot work. But I will make a separate post about this issue.
Thanks in advance for help...

Fonts showing up in Font Book, but not in other apps

This morning, while rummaging through Font Book for something new to use, I discovered that some of my (large) collection of fonts did not show up in various programs... meaning I never think of using them unless I'm actually rummaging through Font Book.
I got onto the Apple support forums and looked at why this might be. I discovered that some of my fonts, for various reasons, were only in the "User" folder, while some that were listed in "All Fonts" were NOT showing up in the User folder. Cleaning this up seemed like a good place to start. I quit Font Book and all other programs, went to /Library/Fonts and ~/Library/Fonts, and moved all the fonts in the User folder into the All folder, as suggested on some answers here. (In addition I changed my Font Book prefs so that new additions in the future will not go to the User folder, but to the main folder and be usable to all.)
Then, also following answers here,
—I did a Safe Mode reboot
—rebooted again out of Safe Mode
—removed font cache files through Terminal
—and finally checked Font Book.
The screen shot above shows that all fonts are under "All Fonts" now, instead of some showing up only under All and some, oddly, only under User, as it was before I started the cleanup. Nice and neat. There is no User folder anymore, and I assume that is because it has no contents—User gets what All gets. Seemed like everything worked.
So I opened one of the programs I use to take notes (Microsoft Entourage), just for a quick check...
... and discovered that some fonts which *have* always been usable, are now not showing up. (On the plus side, however, some of those fonts which had been hidden to me—ones that I discovered in my morning rummage—are showing up, so half of what I was aiming for is working.)
I read a few more support forum posts, and saw that some folks have success when they remove the fontbook .plist. So I did this as well, and checked everything again.
Font Book itself is still nice and neat, and appears to be complete, but Entourage and TextEdit, which I chose to be representatives of how this font cleanup is working in real programs, still do not show all my fonts. And stranger still, though most of their problems are the same, each of the programs also has different fonts which are or aren't showing up!! For instance: Aviano Slab, shown highlighted in the screenshot, isn't visible in either program, but Aviano Flare, right above it, is visible/usable in TextEdit but not visible/not usable in Entourage.
Now, to be clear, as far as I know all of my typefaces are currently showing up in Font Book, and about 95% of my fonts are visible in both Entourage and Text Edit, even though the 5% that's problematic is partially the same/ partially different in each. I hope I'm not going to have to open every single program I own to keep checking for variations—hopefully knowing that there *are* variations between programs will help someone to give me a suggestion.
If the 5% that don't work were the exact same, I was going to assume Mac voodoo. My lame workaround was going to be, to manually check my font folder against one program or the other, and copy every font that doesn't show up, back into the User folder. It would take quite a while, and there would be two copies, but at least the ones that are not visible to my programs would (hopefully?) be visible again.
But the ones that don't show up and therefore can't be used are not all the same. So this indicates worse voodoo, some sort of font management issue that I don't get, and it probably means I'd be at this check-and-copy thing forever with each and every program I use. Or, I could waste a lot of disk space, and copy all fonts to User. Ugh.
So I'm hoping that by laying out everything I *have* already tried this morning, someone will be able to spot a step I missed that will help me get Font Book to wrangle these darned typefaces better.
If Font Book *thinks* all fonts are now available to all users, how can I get my programs to agree—and get my programs also to "see" and let me use all of my fonts?
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.5)
Font Book version 3

Okay!
So, should anyone else ever find themselves with this weird problem, here's what the rest of my day looked like—and yes, I did at last get the problems solved.
First I printed out a list of all my fonts (in the /Library/Fonts folder). Very long. Then I skimmed through the two programs standing in, hopefully, for every program, to try and see if something the problem fonts have in common would jump out at me.
One thing did: all of the "problem" fonts in TextEdit (the ones that didn't show up, in other words) were from a period when one of the type companies I use was automatically installing to a subfolder within the font folder (named with their company's name). Though TextEdit "sees" all the fonts in the Microsoft subfolder, apparently it can't handle other subfolders. So I removed all of these fonts from the company subfolder to the main /Fonts folder, and solved one problem. This problem, oddly, must have been there all along, but who uses a ton of fonts in TextEdit? So I didn't notice the problem until I was troubleshooting today, and thinking that was a nice neutral program to test things in.
But it did nothing for the problem in Entourage, which is where I began my day—even though *some* of Entourage's problem fonts were also in that subfolder, most were not, and the ones that were in that subfolder were still not made visible to Entourage by moving them out of it. So then I scrubbed the long, long list of fonts, looking for all the ones that were not visible in Entourage. Blech. That took a while.
When I got my complete list of missing fonts, I went back to Font Book and validated all of those fonts. I discovered that all but one, share one tiny problem: the "'name' table structure" error. (The final font did have a minor error in validation, but not that error.)
Now I didn't make a list early this morning, so I can't be sure that every one of these fonts was among the ones that started my attempt to clean up and make things right, but I'm assuming they are. I suppose it's possible that during the things I tried to fix the mess today, that one or two fonts actually started working on their own, but probably this list would be the same as one I could have made in the morning, back when I was young and innocent and thought I wouldn't need lists because it was all going to work with ease.
Before I got too excited, I then stopped and validated all the fonts I have. I wanted to make sure that this wasn't an error tons of fonts of mine have, in which case I had not located the problem. But in fact, only the typefaces I couldn't see in Entourage had this error. So I went back to the www to search for what to do about this error.
And in case anyone else needs to replicate my success, this is the site with the fix that worked for me on it:
http://www.iwebss.com/tech/540-fixing-fonts-with-validation-errors-on-mac
Skip down to where it says "Quick Instructions." Download the program suggested there, and do *exactly* what it says under Quick Instructions and no more (and please, make a folder with copies of any otfs or ttfs you need to do this with before you try the fix, in case it doesn't work for you as it did for me and you need to back up to the old versions).
One note: in those instructions, he doesn't mention that after "Save As," the program may hang up and give you a nasty message about access—just go to the Finder and do a Force Quit, no need to report, open the program again, and carry on. You haven't harmed the font or the program, and it does save before hanging up, so you can just go on to the next font in your list. For some miraculous reason, doing this does repair the "'name' table structure" error (and the error that the one odd font had as well!), and when I reopened Font Book, Entourage, and just for good measure, TextEdit, all of the fonts which had been plaguing me were perfectly visible and absolutely functional.
Thank you, Kurt, for your good ideas here and elsewhere on these forums. You were of great help to me today even before your answered this question. Though I was so deep in troubleshooting that I didn't get back to see your latest reply, I appreciate your taking the time to try to guess at this very odd hiccup.
Why this error bothers some programs and not others... why it's so easy to fix, with a simple program that you purposely use to make absolutely no changes... who knows. But check your subfolders first, and if that's not the problem, try validating fonts and see if the "'name' table structure" error is at the root of your problems. Perhaps this will work for others.

Can not enable fonts for User library in Font Book

Hi all,
For some reason I can not enable the user library in the font book using the options in the font book. This means that the User Library is "off". I have tried the following but none of them have worked:
* Reboot.
* Delete the Font preferance file.
* Undo the font book via booting in safe mode and then rebooting in normal mode. Delete the trash which contains the font cache.
* Manually insert fonts into User>Library>Fonts and restart.
* Manually empty user fonts folder and re-insert fonts back in.
* Delete the user fonts folder and re-create it and insert all fonts back in
Have also tried a few combinations of the above but none of them have worked. I do not want to use the system library fonts folder as this machine is on a network and the users should not have admin rights to their machines.
I have also checked the user rights to the user fonts folder and all seems ok there.
Does anyone know how to solve this problem so that I can enable the User font library?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Slack

I have found that for me, on both a PowerMac G5 and an Intel iMac, both running 10.4.8 with all updates, turning on FileVault reliably causes the problem. I.E., if FontBook is working fine on an account which does not have FileVault turned on and I turn on FileVault, then the User collection in FontBook is greyed out and Enable "User" doesn't work. If FileVault is on, none of the suggested work-arounds that I have read about in these discussions or in Apple's support articles help.
Sometimes, turning off FileVault is sufficient. Other times, I must turn off FileVault and follow the work-around in http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302551 . Sometimes, I must turn off FileVault, throw away the FontBook preferences and restart.

Font Book: Installed postscript Fonts don't always appear in Font Book list

Greetings,
I was helping a user the other day with Font Book. I was showing him how to add/enable fonts into Font Book when I noticed a problem I had never seen before. Before I get started, the fonts in question are from the Adobe 7 Font Folio library. There were newly installed by me from the original disk, and known not to be corrupt. I also know that that Postscript fonts are an accepted font format in Tiger.
That said, when adding.installing a particular font using Font Book, it would not "Appear" in the Font Book" list of fonts. I would attemp to, again add/enable the font (by selecting it from the Adobe Library) and still it would not appear in the Font Book list with the other installed fonts. This would happen to any font that I tried to install. Once this happenend to a specific font, I could no longer get that specific font to install.
I removed the Font Book .plist - no luck. I also rebooted - no luck.
Obviously, no application was able to recognize any of the fonts that would not install.
It was as if Font Book would not recognize any font that I was trying to add/enable.
Could this be a corrupted cache issue, or .plist problem? Could this be a permissions related issue? What did work finally was to add the font to the "Computer" set, where it would be avaialbe to all users. But I could not get the font to install into the "User" set. Weird.
Also, What is the significance of these four fonts:
HelveLTMM
Helvetica LT MM
Times LT MM
TimesLTMM
These fonts above are part of the default package that is loaded into the /System/Library/Fonts
Is it safe to replace these with Postscript version from my Adobe 7 Font Folio collection?
I have read most of the font related tutorials and articals.
thanks,
Hairfarm
G4 Mac OS X (10.4.3)
G5 Mac OS X (10.3.6)

where did
you get the information about pre-92 Adobe postscript
fonts being uncompatible?
Oh, sure, it's hard enough for me to remember things these days and now you want me to remember where I learned them from?? geez... [gone lookin' ... okay, back] It was, as I vaguely recalled, on the Adobe site, re troubleshooting in OS X, in a list of "do this to solve your problems": "Make sure that you are using the latest version of the font... If the font's creation date is prior to 1992, a new version of the font may be available." The only Type 1's that have given me any problems were, all three of them, older than 92, and in troubleshooting something here a few weeks ago, that turned out to be a problem for someone else, too.
But all of the Tiger font
research that I have done suggests that Adobe
Postscript fonts were acceptable.
Yes, well... Type 1's are supported. It seems that some older ones are a little funky (not in a design sense....)
Ideally, what fonts can be removed from Tiger from
the System/Libray/Fonts folder? I know that all four
of the MM's (Helvetica LTand Times LT), Lucida
Grande, Geneva, Keyboard, Last Resort, and Monoco
must stay, but what about the others?
You also need a real Helvetica - that is, not the MM version. You can replace the system's Helvetica with one of your own, but there must be an available Helvetica around at all times.
Then there's AquaKana (two of them, regular and bold). They're not on Apple's official "do not remove" list, but there's some anecdotal evidence of its being needed. It's "real" name begins with a period, so it doesn't appear in any menu, so it's not going to hurt anything if you leave it there.
In stripping down nonessential fonts, lots of people just remove everything from the Library/Fonts folder, but I think it's good to leave the basic most common web fonts available: Comic Sans, Georgia, Trebuchet, Verdana, Times New Roman. This keeps web pages looking the way they're supposed to - and they shouldn't conflict with anything that's being really designed!
This is assuming that the fonts
being used are not damaged and "Pass" Font Book's
validation test.
The assumption within that assumption is false: Font Book's validation is pretty iffy. I think the only reason we don't see it as REALLY iffy is because fonts, on the whole, are pretty solid in OS X (your current experience to the contrary). I've installed fonts (properly) that flew through the automatic-on-install validation but failed when I used the Validate Font command afterwards. I've had fonts that pass both the on-install and specific after-install validation but get a Bad Font warning dialog when being re-enabled after a disabling. (And I didn't use the font in between... ) Who knew Font Book did any validating when you re-enable fonts??
This is what I would do:
(Not necessarily in this order)
1. Trash Font Book .plist
2. Trash all Font Cache's from all three libraries
(System, Computer, and User folders)
3. Reboot
4. Delete problem fonts from User and Computer
Libraries and reinstall using Font Book.
Please tell me if this strategy is ill-advised, and
what the better course of action might be.
None of it is ill-advised. I would add starting up in Safe Mode to see if the problems exist there as part of the narrow-down-the-problem stage. Same goes for setting up a separate user account and see how things are behaving there. (Yikes... did you try that yet??)
In addition, there are some special things to do when it's Office apps having the problem, or something going on with Adobe's application fonts folder...
Also, Zaph Dingbats is acting up as well. I removed
the .dfont version that was in the system folder, and
replaced it with the Adobe Font Folio Postscript
version (ITC Zaph Dingbats) that I loaded into Font
Book User/Library/Fonts folder. Now that I think
about it, that specific font has been around for
along time, and may very well be pre-1992. Hmmm...
Can you further define "acting up" ? In addition to the ZD dfont from the system, I've been using/testing ITC ZD from Adobe with no problems. It's version 2.0 with copyright dates of 1985 through 1987.
A lot to respond to. My apologies.
No problem. You caught me on a night when I'm too tired for real work but not so far gone I can't do this (tho I'm soon on my way, bleary-eyed, to get a fix of Sudoku puzzles).

Mail only works with Font Book open

I copied a lot of fonts to my laptop and all the fonts would show up on my desktop publisher. I did not want all the fonts enabled so I disabled the ones I didn't need. Later I noticed that I needed to enable essential fonts for my system, so I did that. BUT now when I start up my mail, it will start up slightly. It looks like it will start but I get the beach ball and it keeps turning and never starts up. The only way I can use my mail is to have the Font Book application opened. If I quit mail and start it up again, it will not work. I can only start up Mail, when I have Font Book up. If I quit Font Book, Mail mail continue to work. It's almost like it needs a jump start from Font Book...
How can I fix this? Is there a particular font that is needed for Mail? Maybe the list of essential system fonts I got was incorrect...

Sorry, but I have to agree with the OP. There should be a switch, and perhaps the default for that switch should be as you stated, however it would be great to have the option there.
And anyway, with file sharing on (like most Macs on my uni network have, see attached), you can put anything in their drop boxes at any time. Airdrop is a simplified version of this, so why not have an always on option as well?
Waiting for a clever person to come up with hack. Perhaps it drains battery life in terms of the ad hoc feature of Airdrop. I dunno.

Font Book acting very very weird, had to abandon it...

Hi all.
This happened before but this time it seems permanent...
I use Chinese True Type Fonts (.TT) as part of my daily work, but I only load them when I need to use them in Photoshop.
Today as usual I enable the whole lot of them in Font Book as any other day, but when I launch Photoshop, after scrolling down to the last English Font, the Chinese Fonts that should appear after that were not there...
I tried Repairing Permissions, quit and launch both PS and Font Book, restart... to no avail.
And I understand the when Font Book loads the fonts, it actually place a duplicate copy from its origin to the User's Fonts folder or somewhere in the main System's Font folder, right??
Anyway, I went into those font folders and sure, all the Chinese Fonts are all there, they just don't show up in Photoshop?? So in order not to "overload" my fonts folders, I deleted all of the Chinese Fonts, and some other extra English fonts that I have activated and been staying inside those font folders...
So now I use (back) Suitcase X1, which for some reasons I don't quite like, for one you have to keep it launch from startup, but using Suitcase to activate all my Chinese Fonts, they are back in Photoshop, where they should be... and I am beginning to appreciate Suitcase, for it just activate the fonts from wherever they are, and not copying another duplicate and place them in the Fonts folders.
But I would still like to find out what might have cause my Font Book to "malfunction"??
Thanks and cheers

Open Mail and check the default email client in its preferences.
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Font book disabling fonts

I'm running Mavericks 10.9.2 and my Font Book application seems to randomly disable fonts. When I open the application to enable certain fonts, it disables them again anywhere from 5 minutes to a week later.
There is no preference to keep all fonts enabled. Any suggestions? As a graphic designer, this is incredibly frustrating beacuse I need access to my font collection every single day!

I have the same problem, Arial font is the one that affects me the most because it's used by a lot of websites. when arial is disabled in font book those websites look weird using other fonts.
I'm also a graphic designer and I use Suitcase for my font management, I don't know if they might have compatibility issues thats causing the problem.
Have you solved this?

How can I copy a Font Book library with "Collections" to my 2nd laptop?

How can I copy a Font Book library with "Collections" to my 2nd laptop?
I have a number of fonts (approx. 500) on my work laptop which are sorted to different Collections. I'd like to have a copy of the Font Book library with Collections on the laptop I use at home to work. I'd think there was a more straight forward way to do it, but I haven't found any posts regarding the matter so any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

To anyone who is reading this based on needing to copy their Font Book to another machine as I do, there is a way to make a copy of the fonts in Font Book by going to file/export fonts. Keep in mind that you will need to have all the fonts selected (command A) in your "All Fonts" list for them to be exported. You will then have a new folder saved to where ever you chose, with all your Font Book fonts in it.

Font Book and duplicates. Strange Behaviour?

Hello,
I’d like to ask a question about Font Book and font duplicates.
Here is the situation. I’ve just installed Microsoft Office 2008 on a MacBook Pro (13’) running Snow Leopard (10.6.8). After the installation is complete and all of the Office updates are installed, I went to Font Book to check for issues. Surely enough, there were font duplicates.
In all cases, the fonts installed by MS Office (/Library/Fonts/Microsoft/) are older than the Snow Leopard system fonts (/Library/Fonts/). However, when in Font Book I Ctrl-click to “Resolve Duplicates”, what Font Book then does seems counter-intuitive, to say the least: it actually disables the newer Snow Leopard system fonts and leaves the older versions of these fonts installed by Microsoft enabled. No matter what I do, I can’t get Font Book to leave the newer system fonts enabled and disable the older Microsoft fonts.
This seems wrong to me and a source of potential problems. For example, won’t disabling fonts in the system folder and activating older fonts in the Microsoft folder cause future problems for the OS X system?
Am I missing something here? Is this normal? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Stephen

Thanks, 'noondaywitch', for your quick and helpful reply.
Indeed, Ctrl-clicking on the individual font families, and then also on the individual styles of each font family (regular, bold, italic, etc.), one by one, seems to do the trick.
I went through them individually, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to Font Book’s logic if you unleash it on the whole lot at once. In this case, unless I actually checked each style of each individual font family, it would appear that Font Book sometimes left older versions of a font activated, while disabling newer ones. To me at least, this seems bizarre. But then again, I’m not Font Book...
Thanks also for the link.
Regards,
Stephen

HT2509 Font Book vs Mountain Lion issue

Font Book keeps crashing as soon as it loads now that I have installed Mountain Lion. Is there a Font Book update that I need? I currently have Font Book 4.1
Using a 27" iMac 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 with wireless keyboard. Don't seem to be able to do a Safe Reboot either.

You were right; corrupt fonts. Reloaded all fonts but did not validate any with issues. Seems to be fine now.
Until I need them again, of course. Which, most probably, will be in the near future.
Thanks for your help. I will persevere with Mountain Lion until something else goes haywire. Not impressed so far.

Font book keeps enabling ALL of my fonts - Overloading my system

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