Want to remove noto fonts (split)

[PixelPest]

As per Aug. 17th 2021 this question goes directly to Serif why not using the regarding Apple API. I'm now working with a "favourite " list, which means to put new fonts onto that list - sucks less than scrolling a bazillion Notos.

[R C-R]

2 minutes ago, PixelPest said:

As per Aug. 17th 2021 this question goes directly to Serif why not using the regarding Apple API.

I still do not understand what Apple API you mean. Can you tell me anything more specific about what font API that is? Also, when you mentioned "Applejuicefactory´s own apps" do you mean just apps made by Apple or also some third party ones?

[lacerto]

An odd thing happened. A few minutes ago I had all those Notos listed in Affinity apps. Then I created a collection that I named as "My Collection", and copied there (within Font Book app), all fonts from the "All fonts" category. I then removed all "Noto" fonts from "My Collection", and then deleted "My Collection" (I did the whole thing just to see if VectorStyler could then use just "My Collection" to restrict the font list, but it did not even show the whole collection).

After that, all Affinity apps, both version 1 and 2, only show the five Noto fonts that are locked, so the long list of available but not installed fonts are no longer shown!

I am on macOS Ventura on a computer that had Big Sur as the first OS, so perhaps something has changed along OS updates but just old font caches now got refreshed (but why, there does not seem to be any logic). Anyway, I have restarted and the situation has stayed, so perhaps some kind of a solution?

UPDATE: The Noto fonts still reside where ever they have always resided so e.g. VectorStyler (that also includes hidden Document fonts like Seravek in font lists, while Affinity apps cannot show them on Ventura) still lists all those hundred + Noto fonts. It is just that now non-locked Noto fonts are no longer listed in Affinity apps (so this is basically in line with non showing fonts like Seravek).

[v_kyr]

• How do I disable the Noto fonts?
• Removing NOTO fonts
• Can I get rid of the Noto font families...
• How to remove Noto Sans
• Font Menu Cleaner 1.0.1
• ... and so on, do a Google search after the topic ...

[R C-R]

49 minutes ago, lacerto said:

An odd thing happened. A few minutes ago I had all those Notos listed in Affinity apps. Then I created a collection that I named as "My Collection", and copied there (within Font Book app), all fonts from the "All fonts" category. I then removed all "Noto" fonts from "My Collection", and then deleted "My Collection"

I tried doing this on my Mac running Catalina but in Font Book, as soon as I tried to remove any of the Noto fonts I got this message:

So what am I doing wrong & how do I avoid this?

[R C-R]

28 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

• How do I disable the Noto fonts?
• Removing NOTO fonts
• Can I get rid of the Noto font families...
• How to remove Noto Sans
• Font Menu Cleaner 1.0.1
• ... and so on, do a Google search after the topic ...

Maybe I'm missing something but all these links seems either to point to apps that are no longer available or do not work with Catalina or later, require buying a 3rd party app, are not relevant to the Affinity apps, etc.

Is there anything specific you can suggest that would work with Catalina & later versions that install all the Noto fonts, other than by buying a third party app (that may not work with the most recent macOS versions)?

[Old Bruce]

I made a Collection in the Font Book App containing all of the fonts I would use. In other words non Latin scripts are excluded as well as all the Noto fonts. I named it English. I keep that and use it with either the Character Panel or the Text Styles Panel when searching for fonts. I very very rarely use the Context Toolbar to search for fonts because of the Noto (etc) fonts I will never ever use.

Apple has really fallen down with their Font usability in recent years, far too many fonts with no way of excluding them from view. I am just guessing but I would think that those who speak languages which are written with non latin based scripts are equally frustrated.

[lacerto]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

I tried doing this on my Mac running Catalina but in Font Book, as soon as I tried to remove any of the Noto fonts I got this message:

Yes, this message is shown if you try to remove the locked Notos (I think there are five), at least if you try to remove them from the system library. But when I copied all fonts from the "All fonts" category to the newly created "My Collection" collection (including inactive ones), and then removed them [the Noto fonts] from "My Collection", and afterwards also removed the whole "My Collection", the superfluous inactive (but unlocked) Noto fonts disappeared from Affinity font lists.

I think that what might have happened is that when I create a collection and then add fonts to it, the physical fonts are actually copied somewhere on my personal library (rather than just referenced; at least creation of the collection took some time). If I then remove these fonts in the collection that I created, those font files are deleted from my personal library. as well. Perhaps the font cache got forced to be recreated at that point for the whole system and the status of Noto fonts (uninstalled but available) got updated.

I have no idea how Apple handles fonts so this is just guessing. 

[R C-R]

21 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I very very rarely use the Context Toolbar to search for fonts because of the Noto (etc) fonts I will never ever use.

Search works fine for me if I know at least part of the name of the font I am looking for, but it is still very annoying that the font list is cluttered with all those Noto fonts & they cannot be excluded.

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, lacerto said:

Yes, this message is shown if you try to remove the locked Notos (I think there are five), at least if you try to remove them from the system library. But when I copied all fonts from the "All fonts" category to the newly created "My Collection" collection (including inactive ones), and then removed them from "My Collection", and afterwards also removed the whole "My Collection", the superfluous inactive (but unlocked) Noto fonts disappeared from Affinity font lists.

Which fonts did you remove & did you do this in Font Book or something else? For me, it does not matter which of the locked Noto fonts I try to remove (even if it just one of the typefaces of any of them), in Font Book I get the error message, so in that app I cannot remove them from "My Collection."

FWIW, all of these fonts are in /System/Library/Fonts/, unlike the ones I can disable that are in /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/ or the Noto Serif Kannada font that (weirdly) appears in /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_Font6/, whatever that is.

So even if I then delete "My Collection" in Font Book, I still end up in Affinity with all these Noto fonts in the list:

I have no idea why Armenian & Zawgyi are listed there -- according to Font Book they do not seem to be installed on my Mac & neither is listed in the "All Fonts" section.

[PixelPest]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

still do not understand what Apple API you mean.

I believe it´s this here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsfontmanager

[PixelPest]

Another very convenient thing Serif simply ignore is the macOS wide file path displayable at the window header via ctrl-click I can´t live without:

[lacerto]

11 hours ago, R C-R said:

I have no idea why Armenian & Zawgyi are listed there -- according to Font Book they do not seem to be installed on my Mac & neither is listed in the "All Fonts" section.

They are not shown on Ventura, either, and now they are not shown in Affinity apps, either, so for me Affinity apps now list fonts as I expect. They do show those five that also show in the Font Book as locked fonts (show a lock icon, and an error message if you try to touch them) that cannot be moved or inactivated. 

Before this change, Affinity apps behaved similarly as in your case when they show Armenian and Zawgyj versions of Noto. Those dozens of other versions of Noto never showed in Font Book. 

All removals and inactivations I have made have been made within Font Book, so I have not done anything in Finder.

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, PixelPest said:

I believe it´s this here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsfontmanager

Thanks for the link. I admit I am not familiar with how these API's can be used but I do not see anything in this one that specifically can be used to exclude certain fonts from an app's available fonts list. Obviously, there must be some way to do that if Vector Styler can exclude all those pesky Noto fonts, but I can't even find a way to do that in that app using either its "All Fonts," "Installed Fonts," or "Collections" options.

In that respect, VS seems just as bad as Affinity.

[PixelPest]

8 minutes ago, R C-R said:

In that respect, VS seems just as bad as Affinity.

Yup. As I said it´s up to the developers - not the users.

[lacerto]

10 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Obviously, there must be some way to do that if Vector Styler can exclude all those pesky Noto fonts

I think PixelPest mentioned Vectornator Pro. I assume that what was meant is that enumerating fonts should be in the hands of the developer so that irrelevant fonts can be skipped. If defaults are used, or library functions that are not customizable, you get bulk lists. But as shown there seems to be more than just this, some old caches, etc., and also anomalies related to OS updates (e.g., so called Document support fonts that were revealed in earlier OS versions but are now hidden; or system fonts that were formerly distributed as static fonts but are now distributed as variable fonts).

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, lacerto said:

They are not shown on Ventura, either, and now they are not shown in Affinity apps, either, so for me Affinity apps now list fonts as I expect.

All I can tell you is for me they do show up in the Affinity apps on Catalina.

4 minutes ago, lacerto said:

Before this change, Affinity apps behaved similarly as in your case when they show Armenian and Zawgyj versions of Noto. Those dozens of other versions of Noto never showed in Font Book. 

If you mean the change to Ventura, I guess I am out of luck, but if you mean something else, I still do not know what it might be. Also, for me, all the Noto versions except those two do show up in Font Book so even excluding those two, there are well over a dozen Noto typefaces listed both in Font Book & in Affinity.

[lacerto]

4 minutes ago, R C-R said:

there are well over a dozen Noto typefaces listed both in Font Book & in Affinity

So, it seems that earlier OS versions listed more of them than Ventura does, and this behavior is somehow carried along OS updates (for me on this computer, starting from Big Sur). Which then points to existence of obsolete font caches that I happened to get rid of when fiddling with a user-created Collection.

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, lacerto said:

I think PixelPest mentioned Vectornator Pro.

Thanks for mentioning that. I just remembered it was Vector something, & since I don't have Vectornator my Mac, I just checked how it worked in Vector Styler, which I do have installed.

6 minutes ago, lacerto said:

I assume that what was meant is that enumerating fonts should be in the hands of the developer so that irrelevant fonts can be skipped.

I wonder if in apps that has to be done for each individual font or typeface that is considered irrelevant & what the criteria for relevancy would be. Seems like it could get quite complicated, at least in apps that support more than one language within a single document.

That said, all I know for sure is having all those Noto typefaces show up in Affinity (&Vector Styler!) is a major annoyance I wish they could eliminate somehow.

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

I tried doing this on my Mac running Catalina but in Font Book, as soon as I tried to remove any of the Noto fonts I got this message:

So what am I doing wrong & how do I avoid this?

Well since those are with Catalina installed additional system fonts, they will be excluded in Apples own FontBook for deletion. You have to try as "root" from a terminal (find the folder they are included in), or download a 15 day trial of RightFont and try with that one!

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

Maybe I'm missing something but all these links seems either to point to apps that are no longer available or do not work with Catalina or later, require buying a 3rd party app, are not relevant to the Affinity apps, etc.

Is there anything specific you can suggest that would work with Catalina & later versions that install all the Noto fonts, other than by buying a third party app (that may not work with the most recent macOS versions)?

Nobody said buying, just use a trial version as you would with Affinity apps too here! - Further inform yourself about Fontmanagement in MacOS first, so you know about that stuff for the future ...

• Font Management in macOS

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, lacerto said:

So, it seems that earlier OS versions listed more of them than Ventura does, and this behavior is somehow carried along OS updates (for me on this computer, starting from Big Sur). Which then points to existence of obsolete font caches that I happened to get rid of when fiddling with a user-created Collection.

I wish for me fiddling with user-created collections in Font Book somehow got rid of obsolete font caches but I have had no luck with that, or by clearing any caches in any other way I can think of.

[R C-R]

2 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Nobody said buying, just use a trial version as you would with Affinity apps too here! - Further inform yourself about Fontmanagement in MacOS first, so you know about that stuff for the future ...

• Font Management in macOS

Thanks, but this font management article is for Big Sur & later & I am running Catalina. For that, the link is http://www.jklstudios.com/misc/OldArticle2/ 

From that, there is this:

Quote

The downside? No matter what font manager you’re using, the OS does not allow you to disable fonts in the System folder. Since all OS installed fonts in Catalina are now in the System folder, you can’t disable them with any font manager. The one and only way to handle the OS supplied fonts now is to copy all unnecessary fonts to a separate folder you can control. Next, remove all of those same fonts from the System folder. Finally, handle the copies with your font manager so you can enable/disable them as needed.

But this does not work for required fonts unless I disable SIP, which I am not willing to do.

[lacerto]

26 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I wonder if in apps that has to be done for each individual font or typeface that is considered irrelevant & what the criteria for relevancy would be. Seems like it could get quite complicated, at least in apps that support more than one language within a single document.

Yes, it can. I do not know Vectornator, either, so I do not know if there is a specific option (e.g. skip Noto, skip non-Western fonts, skip CJK fonts, etc. etc.). But it is not complex to skip user-defined fonts when enumerating the fonts for menu lists. In this case, the routine could basically check if the listed font is visible in the Font Book (or if it is returned because of being a legacy font that was visible in an earlier version of OS; but I have no idea if this is readily available or requires some extra code and knowledge).

As for difference to VectorStyler, I think that their intention is to list all available and hidden, supplemental etc. fonts. In addition to Noto and all its dozens of styles, it means that it can also list e.g. 10 Seravek styles that are available to apps that know that these fonts are included in the OS even if hidden (many other apps, including Adobe ones, can list them, too). VectorStyler has also capability to make disk fonts (not installed on system) available in app menus, including PostScript Type 1 PC fonts and has a kind of Font Manager of its own, so it has means to create meaningful lists (even if it seems that the feature still has some bugs). But it is really a kind of a power-user's app, overwhelmingly complex. 

[PixelPest]

The difference between used macOS API and self-made font management: