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Can you remove junk fonts from Publisher?


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The list of fonts is very long - and you can create favorites.

But sometimes you are looking for a new font.

And you don't want to browse through junk fonts like "Comic Sans" - because you will never pick that font. Actually, you should be punished by twelve strikes to the naked soles of your feet if you ever feel "Comic Sans" is a good choice.

 

There are quite many such junk fonts.

Can you delete them? Or at least have them no longer show up in the long list of fonts - and have  a long list that actually consists of good fonts?

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Publisher is just showing the fonts installed on your system. If you don't want them, why not uninstall them?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
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5 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

If you don't want them, why not uninstall them?

In some cases, that is just the thing to do. In other cases, there may be a need for the fonts to be installed for compatibility reasons that you wouldn't personally choose for yourself. An example from the Mac world are the fonts that are installed in the System folder. You should not delete these, and FontBook will not let you disable them either, saying that they are "protected fonts". Yet, there are 127 font files in that folder, and most of them are for languages I can't read.

I wish the operating systems would allow us to mark fonts to be enabled for display but disabled for font menus. Perhaps Publisher could allow us to blacklist fonts in some way, but my opinion is that it might be asking too much.

The advice I have to World View is to make use of the "Favorite" feature. You can mark fonts you do like in Publisher with a heart, and then you can filter the font menu by favorites.

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Yes, I am using the favorite feature.

Garrett, your idea of disabling fonts from displaying would one feature I'd like on the OS for Mac. And I agree that I don't want to mess with the font book and uninstall fonts there... you never know what problems you could create down the road.

The good fonts are hiding between "chalk" and "comic" and a lot of cheesy handwriting and useless dingbat style symbol "fonts".

After over a quarter century of OS development, individualization of a system is a must. But instead, we are getting useless and cluttering features from software developers who do not ever seem to use the software they are working for - or we wouldn't have all those clutter-beasts.

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23 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

In some cases, that is just the thing to do. In other cases, there may be a need for the fonts to be installed for compatibility reasons that you wouldn't personally choose for yourself. An example from the Mac world are the fonts that are installed in the System folder. You should not delete these, and FontBook will not let you disable them either, saying that they are "protected fonts". Yet, there are 127 font files in that folder, and most of them are for languages I can't read.

I wish the operating systems would allow us to mark fonts to be enabled for display but disabled for font menus. Perhaps Publisher could allow us to blacklist fonts in some way, but my opinion is that it might be asking too much.

The advice I have to World View is to make use of the "Favorite" feature. You can mark fonts you do like in Publisher with a heart, and then you can filter the font menu by favorites.

Use a font manager like Suitcase Fusion or another to turn on and off fonts for your workflow.

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41 minutes ago, Tourmaline said:

Use a font manager like Suitcase Fusion or another to turn on and off fonts for your workflow.

As Garrett mentioned, on mac you can't disable system fonts of folder System > Library > Fonts, it contains 100+ font files. Suitcase Fusion shows them as locked.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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For Mac only. I used the (Included in the OS) application Font Book to make a set of all the fonts which are useful to me as an anglophone and called it English. This set is available for choosing in the various Character and Paragraph panels but is not available in the main font menu. It gets rid of all the other scripts but I would love to be able to select my set from the main font menu.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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18 hours ago, Tourmaline said:

Use a font manager like Suitcase Fusion or another to turn on and off fonts for your workflow.

100$/year - too expensive to balance out a weakness in OS X.

I wish new software versions would fix key things that don't work well instead of gadgety new "features" only geeks and nerds like to play with but nobody actually needs.

So we get messy things like junk fonts you cannot turn off, Mac OS X having trouble building thumbnails from larger images, but we cannot remove fonts that you wouldn't use in a thousand years like all those Asian fonts, dingbat, comic sans, all those cheesy handwriting fonts...

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16 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

I used the (Included in the OS) application Font Book to make a set of all the fonts which are useful to me as an anglophone and called it English. This set is available for choosing in the various Character and Paragraph panels but is not available in the main font menu. It gets rid of all the other scripts but I would love to be able to select my set from the main font menu.

You mean that font sets are not available in Context Toolbar. There are though smart sets like Recent, Used and Favourites.

Having sets in Character panel though helps a long way (I just noticed how smart it is!)! No more Hiragino! Limited sets can be selected also when building styles!

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On 9/22/2019 at 5:57 PM, World View said:

100$/year - too expensive to balance out a weakness in OS X.

I wish new software versions would fix key things that don't work well instead of gadgety new "features" only geeks and nerds like to play with but nobody actually needs.

So we get messy things like junk fonts you cannot turn off, Mac OS X having trouble building thumbnails from larger images, but we cannot remove fonts that you wouldn't use in a thousand years like all those Asian fonts, dingbat, comic sans, all those cheesy handwriting fonts...

What? You know, there is a system application called „Font Book“ („Schriftensammlung“) and you can delete or deactivate fonts – as long as they are no required system fonts. You can create font collections too and activate/deactivate them just as you like. But you say, you "don’t want to mess around with font book". This is really weird: There is a well working system application, but you don’t want to use it and state, that this a „weakness in OS X" (aka macOS X) to have no possibility to customise your system. I’d rather say, it is not a weakness of the system, but a „weakness of the user“. :)

By the way:

  • You can’t „mess" anything, because font book won’t allow you to delete fonts, which arr required by the system. You even haven’t to delete fonts, you simply can deactivate them.
  • There are alternatives to Suitcase fusion, if you need a dedicated fontmanager, for example Monotype’s FontExplorer. And yes: For most professional users it is a no brainer since decades to work with a commercial font manager, especially if working with fonts is the focus of their profession. For all other designers Font Book is completely fine.
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1 hour ago, Fixx said:

There are though smart sets like Recent, Used and Favourites.

Having sets in Character panel though helps a long way (I just noticed how smart it is!)

To me the order in the list of "Used" appears quite chaotic, neither in alphabetical nor in page order. (and in "Recent", too?)

Does one understand what defines or influences their order in the pop-up menu – or whether I can change it?

Also I wonder whether I can manage to 'like' a specific face only and not its complete family as "Favourite". It appears the single faces don't offer the 'heart' symbol to select it as favourite.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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I like to use Typeface ($20, for Mac only) for my font management needs. I think it is a fair upgrade for the price as compared to FontBook.

But I think we are getting away from the point of this feature request. The fact is that sometimes we need to leave fonts activated for compatibility purposes that we do not actually want to use or want to have our font menus cluttered with. I gave the 100+ protected system fonts as one example of such a case, as you cannot deactivate them or remove them even if you wish you could. In my opinion the OS falls short in this regard, and that is out of Serif's hands.

So what can Publisher do? I think it is already doing a good job with the ability to filter fonts by favorites, used, and recent fonts. Can it or should it do more? I think that is the question that is  being raised.

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5 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

So what can Publisher do? I think it is already doing a good job with the ability to filter fonts by favorites, used, and recent fonts. Can it or should it do more? I think that is the question that is  being raised.

That is an interesting question I never thought of.

Favourites come to mind. Why not mark fonts as 'non favourite (a.k.a. to be hidden)' and have them excluded from all lists. Except for one list with the 'non favourite' fonts from where they can be reactivated again.

I've never seen something like this in another application and it could be a novel idea (but perhaps I haven't seen it all :))

d.

Affinity Designer 1 & 2   |   Affinity Photo 1 & 2   |   Affinity Publisher 1 & 2
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8 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

doing a good job with the ability to filter fonts by favorites, used, and recent fonts. Can it or should it do more?

In what font name order do you get these filtered menu items? – Alphabetically? Recent use?

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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2 minutes ago, thomaso said:

In what font name order do you get these filtered menu items? – Alphabetically? Recent use?

The "Recent" list appears to be filtered by most recently used. The "Used" list is not alphabetical and does not appear to be in order of recent use either. Perhaps it is built in the order the fonts are declared somehow in the document?

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1 minute ago, garrettm30 said:

The "Used" list is not alphabetical and does not appear to be in order of recent use either. Perhaps it is built in the order the fonts are declared somehow in the document? 

So it appears chaotic for you, too, in a way that you don't know a mental system which you can use to detect/find a font name in the list?

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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Just now, thomaso said:

So it appears chaotic for you, too, in a way that you don't know a mental system which you can use to detect/find a font name in the list?

I do agree. Fortunately, I do not use more than a few fonts per document, so finding a font in that list is not hard, but I do think something should be done so that there is a predictable order.

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14 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

Can it or should it do more? I think that is the question that is  being raised

Having sets available both in Character panel and Style panel is enough for me. I tend not to use Toolbars if I can avoid it (I guess they feel microsoftic).

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19 hours ago, thomaso said:

To me the order in the list of "Used" appears quite chaotic, neither in alphabetical nor in page order. (and in "Recent", too?)

My Recent, Used and Favourites lists are all in alphabetical order

(Windows 8.1, No Font Manager)

To save time I am currently using an automated AI to reply to some posts on this forum. If any of "my" posts are wrong or appear to be total b*ll*cks they are the ones generated by the AI. If correct they were probably mine. I apologise for any mistakes made by my AI - I'm sure it will improve with time.

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On 9/22/2019 at 5:57 PM, World View said:

100$/year - too expensive to balance out a weakness in OS X.

I wish new software versions would fix key things that don't work well instead of gadgety new "features" only geeks and nerds like to play with but nobody actually needs.

So we get messy things like junk fonts you cannot turn off, Mac OS X having trouble building thumbnails from larger images, but we cannot remove fonts that you wouldn't use in a thousand years like all those Asian fonts, dingbat, comic sans, all those cheesy handwriting fonts...

Not per year...It's not renting...

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On 9/22/2019 at 11:14 AM, thomaso said:

They aren't at all "faulty" fonts but fonts used by the system and therefore locked in Suitcase.

Not quite locked. You can remove fonts in Windows out of the fonts folder and they are gone. Also from the Suitcase list. But you have to be careful not to move fonts the system needs.

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  • 1 year later...
On 9/23/2019 at 3:20 PM, garrettm30 said:

I like to use Typeface ($20, for Mac only) for my font management needs. I think it is a fair upgrade for the price as compared to FontBook.

But I think we are getting away from the point of this feature request. The fact is that sometimes we need to leave fonts activated for compatibility purposes that we do not actually want to use or want to have our font menus cluttered with. I gave the 100+ protected system fonts as one example of such a case, as you cannot deactivate them or remove them even if you wish you could. In my opinion the OS falls short in this regard, and that is out of Serif's hands.

So what can Publisher do? I think it is already doing a good job with the ability to filter fonts by favorites, used, and recent fonts. Can it or should it do more? I think that is the question that is  being raised.

That gets to the essence of the problem. The System apparently needs 100+ fonts that the User does not (generally) want. I accept that they cannot be deleted, but is it essential to display them in every application's font menu? Is it possible for a developer to ignore them; by which I mean NOT load them in any way, not even in background. Is there a memory hit in loading 100+ extra System fonts into an application's memory at launch time? If there isn't, then keep them in, but there should be a way of filtering 'All' fonts, 'System' fonts and 'User' fonts into different lists and making one's chosen list a fixed UI display preference. Keep the 'Favourites' tag, and deal with 'Recent' by moving them to the top of the current list as many apps do.

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