Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using the Font Book App on your Mac.
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The Font Book App is built into your Mac. It's a very simple app for installing and managing the
fonts that you have. Today it is very easy not to think about fonts at all. Newer Mac users may not
even know what they are. If you're in an app like Pages you see the text here is using a specific
font. Going to the Format sidebar I can see font here and can see the font is currently Times New
Roman. This is what Times New Roman looks like. But if I changed it to something else,
like say Futura, you could see Futura has different looking letters. This is
a different font. There's a variety of different fonts and you could easily see here in Pages all
the fonts that you have and choose one that you want to use for that particular text.
A Font Book is a little utility that comes with your Mac that allows you to see all these fonts,
manage them, install them, and so on. So you can get the Font Book any of the
ways you normally launch apps. For instance, you can go to Launchpad,
search for it there. You can go to your Applications folder and you can use Spotlight.
However you do it when you launch Font Book it looks like this. Now note that Font Book
has been completely remade in macOS Ventura. So if you're using an early version of macOS
the functionality is basically the same but Font Book is going to look a lot different.
So here I've selected All Fonts so I see all of the fonts installed on the Mac and I can
see each one kind of as this little icon. Representing the font is simply two letters,
usually a capital A and a lowercase a for most fonts. I could also switch to just
My Fonts. The difference is My Fonts are the fonts that are installed just for this
user account on your Mac where as All Fonts are the System Fonts and the User Fonts. So
if I had two user accounts on this Mac I may have different fonts installed for each one.
Now in addition to using this Icon View here you can also switch to the Sample View here. Click
on that and now you can see the fonts are shown horizontally with some sample text. You can change
the sample text by just simply clicking on any individual one and changing whatever you want. So,
for instance, I might want to add some symbols here on the left. As soon as I
click somewhere else you can see how all of them update. So that is my new sample text.
So you can edit the sample text anytime that you want. You could also go to this List Mode
here and see all of the fonts. Note that a lot of fonts have multiple variations. So,
for instance, you could choose a font like this and you could see there are multiple
different types. Now on any of these views you can go to View and then you can Show the Pane.
Then you see a sample here on the right. So I can easily see these variations here
or choose another font or I can switch, say, to this view and get all of the letters here.
I can switch to this view and use the Information Sidebar here on the right to be able to see more.
So if you're looking for a font to use in a project you could use Font Book to do that.
Of course most apps will show you a preview of the font, like here in Pages, so you don't necessarily
need to use Font Book. That's why a lot of people can go completely without using Font Book at all.
The other thing you can do with Font Book is you can use it to install new fonts. So once you
have a font, and I've got a folder here filled with fonts that I have purchased in the past,
you can simply take any font that you want and drag it into Font Book. You can also
just drag and drop to the Application Icon. You could also just double click
in the Finder and it will open it up in Font Book. So when I do that
you'll see the step here that I need to complete in order to install it. It will show me a preview.
It will show me any variations and I can click the Install button. Once I do I can see it is
now installed. Now whether it is installed just for this user or for all the users on
this Mac that depends on a setting in Font Book Settings. Then go to Installation and
you can choose If New Fonts Are Installed For the Current User Only or for All Users.
If you ever want to uninstall a font you can select it and then choose Edit and Remove to
remove that font. You also have the option of Deactivating Fonts. So if I have a font chosen
I can go to Edit and Deactivate. What will happen is the font stays installed. So it is not removed
from my Mac. It is just no longer going to show up in apps anymore. Now this can be handy if,
say, you're a graphic designer and you have a ton of fonts installed and you find that
some of your apps work slower because you have hundreds of different fonts. You can
deactivate the ones you don't use very often. Then easily select them again and activate them.
The Sidebar here has some functionality. You can create collections and these are just ways
to basically look at the different fonts you've got. So you can create a new collection here.
You can name it whatever you want. You can put different fonts in it. So if you're looking for
a font that say Font or Modern you can go to the Font Book and quickly find the ones that you put
in those collections. They are like albums in Photos. The fonts are actually in here. They
are all in All Fonts. But you have a different way to organize and view them. You can also even
create Smart Collections which are kind of like Smart Folders in the Finder or Smart Albums in
Photos. You have the ability to Filter here by Active Fonts and Inactive Fonts for instance.
You also see here Downloadable. What this means is that some of the fonts aren't actually on
your Mac. A lot of fonts, particularly ones with languages you're not using, are actually
shown as Available here. You'll see the little Download button there. If I were to actually
switch languages in System Settings and it needed a specific font, it would prompt you to Download
it. But I could download it just here in Font Book by clicking on the little Download button.
One final thing you should know about is once you have installed the new font it may not
necessarily be immediately available in an app that you're using. More and more today
it actually is available as soon as you install it. But, if for some reason you don't see it in
the app that you are using simply Quit the app and start it again and then it should be there.
Now it is important to note that a lot of Mac users, perhaps most Mac users,
never need to use Font Book. It's good to know it is there but your Mac already comes with a variety
of different fonts and you may never need anything except those. But if you do work as a designer
then you may find that you want to add more fonts to your Mac to give you more options or perhaps if
you work with designers then you may find you want to install certain fonts that they give
you in order to view the documents they provide. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.