Font Book on Mac: what it can do and when you need a font manager
Font Book is the free app for fonts that comes with every Mac. It installs fonts, shows them in sample text, turns installed fonts off and on, groups them into collections and finds duplicates. For a few dozen fonts that's all you need. A font manager starts to pay off when you keep hundreds of fonts in folders or often open files from other people.
Where to find Font Book
It's already on your Mac. Press Command and Space, type Font Book and press Return. It also opens by itself when you double-click a font file: the small window with the font and the Install button is part of Font Book.
What Font Book can do
Install fonts. Double-click a font file and click Install. Or open Font Book and drag font files into its window. After that the font shows up in the font list of every app. If it doesn't, see what to do when a font isn't showing up.
Show fonts in your own words. Switch to the view with sample sentences (Apple calls it Sample view). Double-click a sentence and type your own text, for example the name of the brand you're working on.
Turn a font off without deleting it. Select the font and choose Edit > Deactivate. The font stays on your Mac, but apps stop offering it. Edit > Activate brings it back.
Remove a font. Select it, press Delete and confirm with Remove. The file goes to the Trash. Fonts that came with macOS can't be removed or turned off.
Gather fonts into collections. Choose File > New Collection, give it a name and drag fonts into it, for example "Wedding invitations". One font can sit in several collections at once.
Find duplicates and broken files. File > Resolve Duplicates finds two copies of the same font and helps keep one. File > Validate Selection checks fonts: a green mark means the font is fine, yellow is a warning, red means the file has problems.
All of this is free and needs no setup.
Where Font Book stops
Comparing many fonts means installing them all. You can look at one file by double-clicking it, but to compare dozens of fonts side by side in Font Book, you install them first. With hundreds installed, the font menu in Photoshop or Word becomes endless.
It doesn't fetch fonts for other people's files. When Illustrator or InDesign says a file has missing fonts, Font Book won't go looking for them in your folders. You find each font and install it yourself.
No font catalog inside. Google Fonts lives on its own website: you download each family and install it by hand.
Font Book or a font manager: which one you need
- A few dozen fonts, mostly for your own documents. Font Book is enough, and it's free.
- Hundreds of fonts sorted into folders. A font manager lets you browse them without installing everything.
- Client projects and files from other designers. A font manager that turns on the fonts a file needs saves you from hunting for each one.
- You often pick fonts from Google Fonts. A manager with the catalog built in saves the downloads.
If Font Book isn't enough
SXfont is made for the second half of that list. You connect the folder where your fonts live, and SXfont shows them as cards set in your own text, without installing them all. Click the bolt on a card and the font appears in all your apps. When you open an old file or someone else's, SXfont finds the fonts it needs in your library and turns them on. Google Fonts is built in, and tags let you gather fonts for each project. More in the list of features.
SXfont costs $29 once, with 14 days free and no card needed. It runs on macOS 13.5 or later, on Apple silicon and Intel. Download SXfont and connect the folder you're working with.
Try SXfont free for 14 days, no card needed.
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