Hide foreign language fonts

[Jeremy Bohn]

There are tons of foreign language fonts installed by macOS. Starting with Catalina, there is no way the manually remove them anymore. However, Apple made it so they don't show up in the font menus of typical Mac apps. One exception is Affinity apps. For example, see how many of this one font is clogging up my font menu:

That font isn't even listed in FontBook. It's only one example. There are a lot. Please make the Affinity apps behave like other apps with these fonts, or at least provide an option. Thanks!

[Jeremy Bohn]

I found this 2017 thread here and it ends with "We have now resolved the problem and will make the fix available in the next iPad & Mac release." Maybe this is a regression? The problem exists in the 1.8 beta too.

[walt.farrell]

7 hours ago, Jeremy Bohn said:

I found this 2017 thread here and it ends with "We have now resolved the problem and will make the fix available in the next iPad & Mac release." Maybe this is a regression? The problem exists in the 1.8 beta too.

Possibly @Patrick Connor, who made that comment, would be able to find out.

[Lorox]

I just happened to be annoyed (again) by the clogged font menus in the Affinity apps (and not only there to be frank), so I once again did some searching the web...

1

If it's to believed what many people say, it boils down to Apple adding all these fonts to the OS and effectively preventing them from being deactivated by any 3rd party font managers in the way you generally activate/deactivate fonts you yourself have added to your mac.

2

However, in Apple's "Font Book" app you have (always?) been able to filter the list of available fonts by choosing "font collections" like "All Fonts", "Favorites", "Recently used“, "English (or whatever OS language you have)" etc. (on the left in Font Book's UI)

3

Only today I've learned that you can actually use these (OS/Font Book related/created) font "collections" in Affinity, too, to slim down your font menu!

However, this only seems to work in Affinity's "Character" palette (WIndow > Text > Character). Say you have your Affinity app(s) run in English you should be able to choose "English" in the upper left corner of the Character palette and magically exotic and unwanted fonts like "Al Bayan", "Noto Sans Myanmar" etc. will not longer populate that dropdown menu! For me this is a huge improvement.

4

If you're used to just select/assign your fonts by the dropdown menu on the left side of the Affinity context toolbar, you will not be that happy, though, because this font menu is not affected by choosing "English" as the active font collection (as described in 3) – here all the foreign language fonts you probably will never use are still present...

So, at the moment, I see no other way to a more user friendly font menu than to use the dropdown in the Character window/palette with your language chosen as the active collection.

If anyone has any information to do it another way, it will be appreciated, but after reading what so many users wrote about the issue I actually doubt that there is a current solution...

[otheroom]

After searching for ways to remove or hide these fonts by some other method, I ended up here to see what I could find. It would be wonderful if Serif added a panel to the Settings where you could simply blacklist fonts that you don't want in the menus. It seems like it should be a fairly simple thing for them to apply that filter to any font selection dropdown.

[loukash]

The font list on the context toolbar has a Favorites tab, the Character panel and the Text Styles editor show the same Favorites section in the secondary popup menu.
Additionally on Mac, the custom font groups from the system-wide Fonts panel will be also included in the Characters panel and in the Text Styles editor.

As for disabling the preinstalled Mac fonts globally, on MacOS Ventura I was able to disable 153 of 327 system fonts via Font Book app, including the vast majority of Asian fonts which I've never used. (No idea if Sonoma or Sequoia made it any harder though.)

[otheroom]

12 hours ago, loukash said:

The font list on the context toolbar has a Favorites tab, the Character panel and the Text Styles editor show the same Favorites section in the secondary popup menu.
Additionally on Mac, the custom font groups from the system-wide Fonts panel will be also included in the Characters panel and in the Text Styles editor.

Using the Favorites facility within the Affinity apps seems like it will be a reasonable workaround. It's nice that the favorites list is shared by Photo, Designer, and Publisher. I will just have to remember to favorite fonts when I activate them and to select Favorites in the font selection area when I open the apps.

Thanks loukash.