deactive unwanted system fonts Mac Ventura

lcawkins wrote:

I'm tired of not having the ability to deactive fonts I don't use. Like Noto, Helvetica Neue and the like. It's so frustrating that Apple seems to think all of us are incapapble of maintain our own font listings.

Is there any way to deactive these fonts because right now I can't.

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/ab22f8c5-2038-4864-b90f-9374bd5906f3

deactivate why— what exactly is the issue...?

Restore fonts that came with your Mac using Font Book

for general complaints—/submit your Apple Feedback here: Product Feedback - Apple

lcawkins wrote:

I'm tired of not having the ability to deactive fonts I don't use. Like Noto, Helvetica Neue and the like. It's so frustrating that Apple seems to think all of us are incapapble of maintain our own font listings.

Apple gives you extensive features to maintain your own personal font listings. Most people go into Font Book trying to delete system fonts only because popular 3rd party apps refuse to use any of Apple's font management tools.

Don't bother sending feedback to Apple. What do you want Apple to do? Add font management features? It's already done. Give you the ability to maintain your own favourites list? Did that years ago. Hide those foreign language fonts that you don't need. They've always been hidden. They were specifically designed by Apple to be hidden. It is only those 3rd party apps that keep shoving them in your face.

etresoft knows exactly what he's saying. And he's correct.

Before Ventura, you could use most better third party font managers to disable any number of, or all of the fonts in the /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental folder. As of Ventura, you can no longer do that. The system installed fonts are completely off limits.

You'll notice Font Book doesn't show all of the system installed fonts. Neither does Pages, Numbers, or any other Apple created app. Since at least Catalina (and if I remember correctly, it actually goes all the way back to El Capitan), Apple has had an API available to all developers to hide the same foreign language fonts.

The latest Microsoft Office suite does this. So does the entire Affinity suite. For unknown reasons, Adobe is a holdout.

But to focus on your issue of Helvetica. Forget Type 1 PostScript, or old legacy OS 9 suitcase style TrueType fonts. They conflict with the OS installed version of Helvetica. You will never be able to use these again. And it doesn't matter since both of these font types are destined to be completely obsolete very, very soon.

Going forward, you have two choices. You can use the Helvetica fonts installed with the OS. Or, if you need a more complete set, you can purchase the Monotype Helvetica OpenType fonts. These are only available with a subscription. Adobe removed all of their OpenType Helvetica fonts back on June 1, 2022. If you still want to purchase Adobe’s Helvetica fonts, the only way to get them now is to either find a seller online who still has new copies of Font Folio 11, or look for used copies on eBay or the like. Either of these do not conflict with the system installed Helvetica fonts and can be active at the same time.

If you have a requirement to use older versions of Helvetica, then you must be running a version of macOS prior to Ventura.

lcawkins wrote:

Fontbook is not a 3rd party app, it's an Apple app and it doesn't allow you to deactivate these fonts so they are always live, so no you really don't know what you are saying as it doesn't allow me to create my own favorite listing.

Font Book does provide a feature to create your own font collections.

As far as other native programs what are you expecting me to use. TextEdit?? That's unrealistic to even assume!

Apple Pages and Keynote use the built-in font APIs. This is not something that is limited to Apple apps. Any app can use Apple's font APIs and they are encouraged to do so. They simply don't. I don't know why not. Apple can't force them.

Any design program in this industry is not shoving all the "hidden" fonts in my face, they are creating a list of fonts that are active for me to use, that includes all the fonts that are supposedly hidden by Apple.

Then that's a problem with those tools.

In regards to 3rd party programs using Apple's font management tools, they can't because Apple doesn't share.

I don't know what you mean by that. Apple provides extensive documentation on all of its font APIs. It's really not difficult. I don't know why so many 3rd party apps are so obstinate.

Don't blame the 3rd party programs blame everyone for being too arrogant to work together for the end user.

Additionally, you are specifically asking about macOS Ventura. There was one specific font method in macOS Monterey and before that returned a list of "active" fonts that included all of the document support and foreign language fonts like Noto. This caused the font menu in certain popular 3rd party apps to list hundreds of built-in fonts that couldn't be removed.

In MacOS Ventura, Apple changed that "active" fonts method so that it omitted virtually all of these problematic fonts. So you are complaining about Apple's fix?

To be clear, this method was not really broken. It was trivially easy to filter the list of active fonts and remove the document support and foreign language fonts. I literally timed myself. It took 9 minutes of coding.

And yet now, here you are complaining about something that was fixed a year ago?

In MacOS Ventura, Apple changed that "active" fonts method so that it omitted virtually all of these problematic fonts. So you are complaining about Apple's fix?

So that's what it was! I had read Apple was going to make a change in Ventura that would cause foreign language fonts to be automatically hidden in third party apps, but hadn't found a reference to how they were going to do that.

I did notice in Ventura there are only three titles I have that still show every active font on the system. The Adobe suite, Master PDF Editor and something else (too lazy to open every app on my Mac to find it). All others hide these extra fonts.

I compared System/Library/Fonts with Fontbook and of thie 361 fonts in the font folder and the Supplemental folder there are only 21 fonts that do not show up in Fontbook. All the rest do show in Fontbook and they are live.

There are far more than 21 OS installed fonts that do not appear on Font Book. For the Noto fonts alone, the only ones you see in Font Book are the 40 Noto fonts in the /System/Library/Fonts folder. The other 102 Noto fonts in the Supplemental subfolder aren't even listed. There are many others Font Book doesn't list.

In Microsoft Word 365 for Mac version 16.74 they are all there as well so Adobe isn't a holdout.

I was going by the latest (free) version of Outlook where they are all hidden. I presumed the regular paid suite would follow suit. Apparently not.

I have a slew of Helvetica fonts from various sources, and none of them are .ttf fonts. Lots of Apple .dfonts, .ttc versions from Microsoft, Adobe OpenType, Adobe Type 1 PostScript and older Mac OS 9 style TrueType fonts. But no .ttf versions. Not saying they don't exist, I've just never seen Helvetica distributed as .ttf files, and I've been in prepress for over 40 years.

Regardless, you are not going to be able to open those older versions in Ventura. The conflict with the OS installed system versions, which you cannot disable. To work on these standing projects with the same fonts (to ensure no type reflow), you're going to have to use a Mac running an OS older than Ventura so you can disable the OS installed Helvetica fonts.

Kurt Lang wrote:

So that's what it was! I had read Apple was going to make a change in Ventura that would cause foreign language fonts to be automatically hidden in third party apps, but hadn't found a reference to how they were going to do that.

That was the whole problem. That was apparently the only function in the entire Apple fonts API that they were using.

I did notice in Ventura there are only three titles I have that still show every active font on the system. The Adobe suite, Master PDF Editor and something else (too lazy to open every app on my Mac to find it). All others hide these extra fonts.

That's interesting. There are multiple ways to get system fonts. I had speculated that certain apps could be making an effort to look for every font file on system and just listing them all. If they did that, then Apple's change wouldn't have any effect. I don't have any Adobe apps so I couldn't check them.

About the only thing you can do is send feedback to Apple requesting the function you want.

Feedback - macOS - Apple

You can tell Apple all about it: Product Feedback - Apple

Those typefaces cannot be deactivated as they are used by the system