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Too Many Fonts?
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mad jew
Moderator emeritus
In theory, installing 1,000 fonts should be fine. However, that's a fair bit of work for your machine to sort through, so don't expect to be able to use the machine as it's happening. Even so, it may freeze up. If you really want the fonts installed, maybe do so in batches. 🙂
What about day to day use? Does OSX load every font I have at startup or just when I call up a list of fonts?
I don't care if my MBP bogs down when installing the fonts, I'm worried about how it works with all the fonts installed.
mad jew
Moderator emeritus
It loads them at startup. In theory it won't slow your machine down but in practice, it probably will. If the fonts are from a good source then you should be okay, but unless you're going to be using them then I wouldn't bother. They may be more work than they're worth. 😱
FontBook should work fine for you. Linotype has a better version which is a free download. Suitcase is the nicest, but is a paid app.
I downloaded and installed the Linotype program. Pretty nice and very easy to understand. Thanks!
too many fonts?
i have 12,919 truetype fonts 😱. if i install all of these, will it crash my computer?
i have 12,919 truetype fonts 😱. if i install all of these, will it crash my computer?
I just installed 1000 fonts to an leopard penryn 2.5 MBP and I regret doing it so don't! I've spent the past 3 hours deleting them and I'm not even joking but photoshop and word don't even open now because of it.
fonts load for programs that use them
I agree with ibizarocks that too many fonts definitely slows down your system when loading programs like After Effects, Illustrator or Word. I had about 12,000 on my mac pro and After Effects was taking a long, long time to load and being slow even once loaded, especially while working with text. Best practice is to install only the fonts you are going to need at the moment, and maybe a few of your favorites. You can always go click on the .ttf file if you are in leopard you will see a graphical preview of what the font looks like. And of course there are font managing programs out there that will make this even easier.
I agree with ibizarocks that too many fonts definitely slows down your system when loading programs like After Effects, Illustrator or Word. I had about 12,000 on my mac pro and After Effects was taking a long, long time to load and being slow even once loaded, especially while working with text. Best practice is to install only the fonts you are going to need at the moment, and maybe a few of your favorites. You can always go click on the .ttf file if you are in leopard you will see a graphical preview of what the font looks like. And of course there are font managing programs out there that will make this even easier.
might be useful
just thought it would be useful for other people who may stumble upon this post in the future. 🙂
just thought it would be useful for other people who may stumble upon this post in the future. 🙂