How do I hide system fonts in all apps on my Mac?

lindapetaluma wrote:

How do I hide system fonts in all apps on iPhone?

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: hide system fonts

Thanks for posting in macOS Sequoia—

Try over in iPhone: iPhone - Apple Community

lindapetaluma wrote:

How do I hide system fonts in all apps on my Mac?

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: hide system fonts

so which is it now... ???

some body went back in there an changed the title. Again.

I will make a general statement — you can not hide/delete/change default system fonts.

You can however submit your Apple Feedback here: Product Feedback - Apple

if macOS ref: Install and validate fonts in Font Book on Mac - Apple Support

if iOS ref: Install and manage fonts on iPhone - Apple Support

The user can't. All fonts in the System folder are controlled solely by the OS.

Developers have access to an API that allows them to hide all fonts that are not part of your language/region. When active, it hides a lot of them. All of the apps by Affinity do this. The SoftMaker Office suite has an option in its settings to turn this on and off.

Basically, it's up to the developer to include this function. Adobe, for whatever reason, shows all active fonts with no option for the user to hide them by language/region.

This will help a bit. There are a very large number of OS installed fonts you actually can remove, but the only way to do it is via Font Book. All of these "extra" fonts are in the /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_Font7 folder.

This procedure will remove all non-fixed fonts, which means any sets you've created will also be cleared.

Open Font Book. Click on All Fonts at the top of the left column. Highlight any font at the right and then press Command+A to select all of them. Right click anywhere in the list and choose Remove or Deactivate. It doesn't matter which one you select since the result will be the same. You'll get this message:

Click the red button. The entire folder mentioned above will be emptied except for the file com_apple_MobileAsset_Font7.xml.

A very large number of non-English fonts will now be gone from your font lists. If at any point you need a particular font back, all you need to do is right click on that font in Font Book and choose Download.

"How do I hide system fonts in all apps on my Mac?"

You don’t and your “probably everyone else” is rather close minded. Apple is neither reluctant nor unable to add such a feature. Not enough people have asked for it, or Apple has considered and rejected the idea, simple as that. It’s Apple product you know. Have you submitted a request for the feature? Do you know how?

Feedback - macOS - Apple

lindapetaluma wrote:

I want to add to the pleas for a way to hide the system fonts in all apps. It annoys me (and probably everyone else) that I have to scroll through an endless list of fonts I'm not actively using in a project. This has been a problem for years and I don't understand Apple's inability or reluctance to fix it. It can't be that hard.

It isn't. Apple only makes the font APIs for apps to use. Apple doesn't provide the fonts menu itself. The fonts menus look the way they do because app developers have designed them to look that way.

Apple provides numerous ways to reduce the number of fonts being displayed, by grouping them into categories (which the user can change/add/delete) or by tagging them with appropriate languages. But app developers rarely use the tools that Apple gives them. Typically, they just grab every font on the system and throw them in one long list.

And I can tell you from personal experience, of all the things there are to do in a Mac app, providing a decent fonts experience is literally one of the easiest to do. There is absolutely no excuse for what you are dealing with - none whatsoever. It's literally a few minutes of easy, totally risk-free coding.