Locked fonts in Font book

Or even disabled. But, you can remove a lot of the listed fonts, despite the fact they're in the System folder. Open this folder:

/System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_Font7

You can't actually do anything in this folder yourself, but you can watch fonts disappears as you use Font Book to remove them. Basically, you can remove any OS installed fonts by right clicking on any font set that does not have a lock icon and choosing Remove from the contextual menu.

The fastest way to do this (which you couldn't do before Sequoia), is choose All Fonts in the left column. Then select all fonts in the right pane and choose Remove. You then get this message:

Choose Remove Non-System Fonts and the entire com_apple_MobileAsset_Font7 folder will be emptied. All except for a small XML file, com_apple_MobileAsset_Font7.xml.

That regains something over a gigabyte of space, and gets a lot of active fonts off the system. You can just choose to disable them, but I always choose remove as these are all fonts I have zero use for. But, if for some reason in the future you find you need any of them, you can right click on a set and choose Download.

The only downside is any time you do an OS update, they call get reinstalled and you have to remove/disable all of them again.

This works best of course if you don't have any of your own fonts installed via Font Book since they'll also be removed. For me, the only thing ever listed in Font Book are the OS installed fonts as I use Typeface for all other font management.

Kurt Lang wrote:

Basically, you can remove any OS installed fonts by right clicking on any font set that does not have a lock icon and choosing Remove from the contextual menu.

Yes. I thought the question was about "Locked" fonts. 🤔

Well, I did ask what locked fonts the user was referring to that weren't system fonts, as did Tom, and received no response. This is also the Sonoma community, not the Sequoia community. Personally I saw no question about removing fonts in general. But I'm sure someone may benefit.

Well, this is a new one.

In Sonoma, once you remove the fonts in the /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_Font7 folder via Font Book, they stay gone until you apply an OS update or upgrade.

Nothing changed with the OS on my Mac running Sequoia when I got rid of those fonts Saturday. On Sunday, I noticed my available space had dropped by 1.4 GB. That sounded suspiciously like the total space those fonts take up, so I opened the folder. All of those useless fonts were back on the drive!

I removed them again. And now today, PingFang is back in the folder. So far the only one, but now I wonder if simply opening certain Apple included apps automatically download them again. Such as Pages.

Time to start watching and waiting with the folder left open to see what may be causing this.

Oh, for sure. It's not the comparatively piddly space they take up, but my full time goal as a prepress person (even though I'm now retired), is to keep the number of active system fonts as minimal as possible.

If Sequoia keeps putting them back, then I'll use Font Book to disable them instead and see if that holds.

Built-in fonts cannot be removed.

Such as?

Chris_SZ wrote:

I know, but others that aren’t system are also not deleteable

Without specific examples, impossible to help you. Please provide.

Yes, but it was also about removing fonts in general. So, I figured it still helped to note which system installed fonts you can get rid of.

Haha! Didn't notice I was in the Sonoma forum. Hmm, I wonder if selecting all and then Remove works in Sonoma as well? If not, then you have to do them one at a time.

I'm not sure. I don't have anything running Sonoma anymore. I don't even have anything running Sequoia 15.3.1 anymore. 🙂

Interesting but I still have 770 GBs of available space on my 1 TB drive so a GB or two doesn't really affect me much. :)

It's good to have a hobby. 😎