Fontbook Issues

bigdave

bigdave

Well-Known Member
I had 2000(ish) fonts on my macbook pro and it runs CS5 fiine. Ive installed about 2000 fonts on my new imac along with CS5 and its running like a bag of spanners! Fontbook crashes when you open it and CS5 is very slow starting up & swithching between apps. Any ideas?
 
I think, I may be wrong, but the only way round this is to just add fonts to Fontbook as and when you need them. It seems that once added, they’re always active and having 2000 fonts active is always going to have an effect.

But like I said, I may be wrong.
 
I agree with DJB...it seems crazy to install all of your fonts into FontBook as this will definitely slow things down.

Before you delete everything from FontBook, it's worth finding out if there are any corrupt or duplicate fonts in your collection and make a note to delete these from your master font folder.

I keep all of my fonts on an external drive and just install them as and when I need them.
 
The 2000 fonts in my library are only small selection of my collection. Across the various cd's & HDDs I think our collection runs to about 8000?...

There are a number of duplicates (which are disabled) in my font book that I can remove if I can get font book to load without crashing!! When I get my Macbook Pro back from repair I think I'll wipe the imacs font collection and import the font library from the MBP as that works without issue and I know there are no duplicates.
 
I think you're right to wipe that the iMac's font collection...sounds like there could be corrupt font causing you problems.

Is there a cache / prefs file associated with FontBook that you could delete which might enable you to at least get FontBook to start-up?
 
I imagine there will be somewhere...... yes there is, Home > Library > Preferences > com.apple.FontBook.plist

Will give that a go tonight.
 
I had this problem on a mac book sometime back. If my memory serves me well i think I ended up trashing the fonts temporarily and going about it that way, although trashing the preferences would seem a more logical approach.

With thousands of fonts though you may be better off splashing out £100 or so for suitcase. It'll intelligently open and close any fonts in your library avoiding that annoyance of having to do it manually with fontbook.

I ought to add there are alternatives to suitcase, it's just my personal preference.

Just as an additional point for anyone noticing a slow down on lower spec macs. MS office comes with a bunch of fonts which automatically get added to fontbook regardless of whether you have other font management software installed.
 
I've temporarily solved the issue by deleting all fonts snd reinstalling fonts exported from the font book on my mac mini. The odd thing is that CS5 is reading fonts from somewhere else!? I assumed it was a plist error but even after resetting the plists for CS5 it's still reading there being a few thousand fonts available which font book doesn't have!?! Its even embedding these mystery fonts into PDFs?!?
 
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