Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition

Fonts—and Font Book

Mac OS X type 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 9-7), and it’s in your Applications folder.

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.

Here’s a rundown:

• 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.

  Note

  Your Home→Library folder is ordinarily hidden. The quickest way to see it is to press Option as you choose View→Library in the Finder.

• 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.)

  

  Figure 9-7. Each account holder can have a separate set ...