14.7. Fonts—and Font Book
Mac OS X delivers type that is all smooth, all the time. Fonts in Mac OS X's formats—
called TrueType, PostScript Type 1, and OpenType—always look smooth onscreen and
in printouts, no matter what the point size.
Mac OS X also comes with a program that's just for installing, removing, inspecting, and
organizing fonts. It's called Font Book (Figure 14-11
), it's in your Applications folder,
and it's been much improved in Leopard.
Figure 14-11. Each account holder can have a separate set of fonts; your set is
represented by the User icon. You can drag fonts and font families between the
various Fonts folders represented here— from your User account folder to the
Computer icon, for example, making it available to all account holders.
14.7.1. Where Fonts Live
Brace yourself. In Mac OS X, there are three Fonts folders. The fonts you actually see
listed in the Fonts menus and Font panels of your programs are combinations of these
Fonts folders' contents.
They include:
• Your private fonts (your Home folder Library Fonts). This Fonts folder
sits right inside your own Home folder. You're free to add your own custom fonts
to this folder. Go wild—it's your font collection and yours alone. Nobody else who
uses the Mac can use these fonts; they'll never even know that you have them.
• Main font collection (Library Fonts). Any fonts in this folder are available to
everyone to use in every program. (As with most features that affect everybody
who shares your Macintosh, however, only people with Administrator accounts
can change the contents of this folder.)
• Essential system fonts (System Library Fonts). This folder contains the 35
fonts that the Mac itself needs: the typefaces you see in your menus, dialog boxes,
icons, and so on. You can open this folder to see these font suitcases, but you can't

display of every character (choose Repertoire)—or, if you choose Custom, it lets you
type your own text.

14.7.2.2. Printing a reference sheet
For the first time in Mac OS X 10.5, you can now print a handy, whole-font sampler of
any font. Click its name and then choose File Print. In the Print dialog box, click the
button to expand the dialog box, if necessary.
As shown in Figure 14-12
, you can use the Report Type pop-up menu to choose from
three reference-sheet styles:
• Catalog prints the alphabet twice (uppercase and lowercase) and the numbers in
each selected font; use the Sample Size slider to control the size. This style is the
most compact, because more than one print sample fits on each sheet of paper.
• Repertoire prints a grid that contains every single character in the font. This report
may take more than one page per font.
• Waterfall prints the alphabet over and over again, with increasing type sizes, until
the page is full. You can control which sizes appear using the Sample Sizes list.
When everything looks good, click Print.
Figure 14-12. From the Report Type pop-up menu, choose the style you want. The
preview screen shows you each one before you commit it to paper. Type-size
controls always appear in the lower right.
14.7.2.3. Eliminating duplicates
Since your Mac accesses up to three folders containing fonts, you might wonder what
happens in the case of conflicts. For example, suppose you have two slightly different
fonts, both called Optima, which came from different type companies, and are housed in
different Fonts folders on your system. Which font do you actually get when you use it in
your documents?

automatically as you need them. When you open a document that relies on a font it
doesn't have, Leopard activates that font and keeps it available until that particular
program quits.Actually, it does better than that. If it doesn't see that font installed, it
actually searches your hard drive on a quest to find the font—and then it asks you if you
want it installed, so the document will look right.

To disable a font, just click it (or its family name; see Figure 14-11
) and then click the
checkbox button beneath the list (or press Shift- -D). Confirm your decision by
clicking Disable in the confirmation box. (Turn on "Do not ask me again," if you're the
confident sort.)
The font's name now appears gray, and the word Off appears next to it, making it
absolutely clear what you've just done.(To turn the font on again, highlight its name, and
then click the now-empty checkbox button, or press Shift- -D again.)

Note: When you install, remove, disable, or enable a font using Font Book, you see the
changes in the Font menus and panels of your Cocoa programs immediately. You won't
see the changes in open Carbon programs, however, until you quit and reopen them.

14.7.2.5. Font collections
A collection, like the ones listed in the first Font Book column, is a subset of your
installed fonts. Apple starts you off with collections called things like PDF(a set of
standard fonts used in PDF files) and Web (fonts you're safe using on Web pages—that
is, fonts that are very likely to be installed on the Macs or Windows PCs of your Web
visitors).
But you can create collections called, for example, Headline or Sans Serif, organized by
font type. Or you can create collections like Brochure or Movie Poster, organized by
project. Then you can switch these groups of fonts on or off at will, just as though you'd
bought a program like Suitcase.
To create a new collection, click the leftmost + button to create a new entry in the

library.
To create a library, choose File New Library; the library appears in the Collection list
at the left side of Font Book. Now you can drag fonts into it right from the Finder, or set
up collections inside it by highlighting the library's icon and choosing File New
Collection.
14.7.2.7. Exporting fonts
Next time you submit a design project to a print shop or graphics bureau, you won't have
to worry that they won't have the right fonts. It's easy to collect all the fonts you used in a
document, and then export them to a folder, ready to submit, along with your document,
to the print shop.
Use the Services Font Book Create Collection From Text command. Font Book
opens and shows you a new collection it's created, containing all the fonts used in your
document. Click the collection, and then choose File Export Collection. The software
prompts you to name and choose a location for the exported fonts folder.

Note: The Create Collection From Text command doesn't work in all programs, but you
can always build and export a collection manually.

14.7.3. The Fonts Panel
As noted in Chapter 5
, some existing Mac programs have simply been touched up—
Carbonized, in the lingo—to be Mac OS X–compatible. Choosing fonts in these
programs works exactly as it always has on the Mac: You choose a typeface name from
the Font menu or a formatting palette.
Things get much more interesting when you use Cocoa programs (Section 5.9
), like
TextEdit, iMovie, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, iPhoto, and Mail. They offer a standard
Mac OS X feature called the Fonts panel. If you're seated in front of your Mac OS X
machine now, fire up Text Edit or Pages and follow along.
14.7.3.1. Choosing fonts from the Fonts panel

See the handy font sample shown here above the font lists? To get it, choose
Show Preview from the pop-up menu. Or use the mousy way: Place your
cursor just below the title bar (where it says Fonts) and drag downward. Tip: Once you've opened the Preview pane, feel free to click the different sizes,
typeface names, and family names to see the various effects.

• Hide Effects. The "toolbar" of the Fonts panel lets you create special text effects—
colors, shadows, and so on—as shown in Figure 14-13
. This command hides that
row of pop-up buttons.
• Color. Opens the Color Picker (Section 5.13), so you can specify a color for the
highlighted text in your document.
• Characters. Opens the Character Palette (Section 9.13.2), so you can choose a
symbol without having to remember the crazy keyboard combo that types it.
• Typography. Opens the Typography palette (see Figure 14-14).
• Edit Sizes. The point sizes listed in the Fonts panel are just suggestions. You can
actually type in any point size you want. By choosing this command, in fact, you
can edit this list so that the sizes you use most often are only a click away.
• Manage Fonts. Opens Font Book, described earlier in this chapter.
Figure 14-14. The Typography palette is a collapsible menagerie of fancy type
effects, which vary by font. In this example, turning on Common Ligatures
creates fused letter pairs like fl and fi; the Small Capitals option created the
"Do Not Drink" style; and so on.