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Unwanted fonts!!

Why can't I remove all these Asian fonts that clutter my font list? There were Asian fonts before but now there are far too many.


I DON'T NEED THEM!!


Please make them removable with FontBook!!


grt,

Paul

iMac 27" 5K, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jan 6, 2020 1:08 PM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jan 7, 2020 7:12 AM

I should clarify the paths. For "System", it's the /System/Library/Fonts/ folder. For "Supplemental", it's the /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/ folder.


It's not so much "it's good for you" as it is protecting the OS from malware. In Catalina, the OS is separated into a partition group (that's why APFS is required). The OS portion is on a read-only partition, which prevents any possible malware from modifying any files there, or adding anything to that location.


Since fonts are read in at startup, it's possible to infect a system by modifying them to contain unwanted code. Since any OS has no choice but to read in a font in order to use it, the attached malware would be read at the same time. This actually happened a few years back. Not to the Mac OS itself, but some OpenType fonts were going around that had been modified with attached malware. The OS has since been patched against that threat.


All of the included fonts are there because the Mac OS is a multi-national product. You and I may not use the Asian fonts, Devanagari, Gurmukhi or others, but someone does. This way, Apple only has to distribute one installer for any language. You don't see French (as an example) as a font because it uses English characters. It's the localized language files that take care of that difference. For French, the following are in every application package (along with quite a few others for various languages), which are French Canadian, and standard French, respectively.


fr_CA.lproj

fr.lproj


Anyway, if you'd like to read up on where this list derives from, you can read my article:


Font Management in macOS


Required disclaimer: I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

7 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 7, 2020 7:12 AM in response to bkabouter

I should clarify the paths. For "System", it's the /System/Library/Fonts/ folder. For "Supplemental", it's the /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/ folder.


It's not so much "it's good for you" as it is protecting the OS from malware. In Catalina, the OS is separated into a partition group (that's why APFS is required). The OS portion is on a read-only partition, which prevents any possible malware from modifying any files there, or adding anything to that location.


Since fonts are read in at startup, it's possible to infect a system by modifying them to contain unwanted code. Since any OS has no choice but to read in a font in order to use it, the attached malware would be read at the same time. This actually happened a few years back. Not to the Mac OS itself, but some OpenType fonts were going around that had been modified with attached malware. The OS has since been patched against that threat.


All of the included fonts are there because the Mac OS is a multi-national product. You and I may not use the Asian fonts, Devanagari, Gurmukhi or others, but someone does. This way, Apple only has to distribute one installer for any language. You don't see French (as an example) as a font because it uses English characters. It's the localized language files that take care of that difference. For French, the following are in every application package (along with quite a few others for various languages), which are French Canadian, and standard French, respectively.


fr_CA.lproj

fr.lproj


Anyway, if you'd like to read up on where this list derives from, you can read my article:


Font Management in macOS


Required disclaimer: I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

Jan 6, 2020 1:15 PM in response to bkabouter

Because all fonts included with Catalina are in the System folder, there is no font manager that can disable them.


Your only option is to boot your Mac to any other OS you have installed so you can delete the unwanted fonts from the non-startup drive.


There are a LOT of fonts you don't need. This is all I have on my Mac:


System folder:


Apple Color Emoji.ttc

AppleSDGothicNeo.ttc

Avenir.ttc

Courier.dfont

Geneva.dfont

Helvetica.ttc

HelveticaNeue.ttc

HelveticaNeueDeskInterface.ttc

Keyboard.ttf

LastResort.otf

LucidaGrande.ttc

Menlo.ttc

Monaco.dfont

PingFang.ttc

SFCompactDisplay.ttf

SFCompactRounded.ttf

SFCompactText.ttf

SFCompactTextItalic.ttf

SFNS.ttf

SFNSDisplayCondensed-Black.otf

SFNSDisplayCondensed-Bold.otf

SFNSDisplayCondensed-Heavy.otf

SFNSDisplayCondensed-Light.otf

SFNSDisplayCondensed-Medium.otf

SFNSDisplayCondensed-Regular.otf

SFNSDisplayCondensed-Semibold.otf

SFNSDisplayCondensed-Thin.otf

SFNSDisplayCondensed-Ultralight.otf

SFNSItalic.ttf

SFNSMono.ttf

SFNSMonoItalic.ttf

SFNSRounded.ttf

SFNSTextCondensed-Bold.otf

SFNSTextCondensed-Heavy.otf

SFNSTextCondensed-Light.otf

SFNSTextCondensed-Medium.otf

SFNSTextCondensed-Regular.otf

SFNSTextCondensed-Semibold.otf

Symbol.ttf

Times.ttc

ZapfDingbats.ttf



Supplemental subfolder:


AppleGothic.ttf

Arial Black.ttf

Arial Bold Italic.ttf

Arial Bold.ttf

Arial Italic.ttf

Arial Narrow Bold Italic.ttf

Arial Narrow Bold.ttf

Arial Narrow Italic.ttf

Arial Narrow.ttf

Arial Rounded Bold.ttf

Arial.ttf

Comic Sans MS Bold.ttf

Comic Sans MS.ttf

Georgia Bold Italic.ttf

Georgia Bold.ttf

Georgia Italic.ttf

Georgia.ttf

Impact.ttf

Tahoma Bold.ttf

Tahoma.ttf

Times New Roman Bold Italic.ttf

Times New Roman Bold.ttf

Times New Roman Italic.ttf

Times New Roman.ttf

Trebuchet MS Bold Italic.ttf

Trebuchet MS Bold.ttf

Trebuchet MS Italic.ttf

Trebuchet MS.ttf

Verdana Bold Italic.ttf

Verdana Bold.ttf

Verdana Italic.ttf

Verdana.ttf

Webdings.ttf

Wingdings 2.ttf

Wingdings 3.ttf

Wingdings.ttf

Jan 10, 2020 6:22 AM in response to bkabouter

You're welcome.


Yeah, it's a bit tedious to have to setup yet another OS to boot to so you can remove fonts from a different drive/partition, but it's the only "easy" way.


The other is knowing enough about navigating in Terminal (while in a Recovery Mode boot) to remove items via Unix commands. And even that I haven't tested yet to see if it can be done.

Jan 10, 2020 8:01 AM in response to lkrupp

Not those. Font Book displays a lot of Asian and other foreign language fonts you have no control over. They're listed, but all grayed out. You can't disable them. You also can't disable anything in the System folder.


Many of those Asian fonts aren't even in the System or root Library folders. They're buried in the OS as stub (subset) fonts. In Catalina, they're all in this location:


/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/FontServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Fonts/Subsets/


You aren't supposed to see them at all. But in Mojave (and weirdly, not all versions of it), this very large set of subset fonts very annoyingly appear in all of your app's font lists.


Since Catalina is the OS in question for this topic, those subset fonts are correctly hidden from the user. The problem still remains that it's impossible to disable any fonts in the System folder with any font manager. Deleting these unnecessary fonts (for an English speaking user) is the only way to get them out of your font lists.

Unwanted fonts!!

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