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SnarkyBear

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 24, 2014
190
387
With the recent download of MS Office and Libre Office, it seems that I have way more fonts than I need. I tried to disable some of the non-English fonts in the Font Book app, but virtually every font had the "Disable XX Family" grayed out.

Is there any way to reduce the number of fonts I am inundated with when I work in Word, Excel, etc.?
Thank you for your time!
 

Panthera Tigris Altaica

macrumors member
Nov 29, 2018
78
65
In the Frozen North, of course.
Which fonts are you attempting to remove and where are they located? Around here the only grayed out fonts are system fonts, located in the System. Fonts found elsewhere, including the Library/Fonts and the ˜/Library/Fonts folders can be removed/disabled/otherwise worked with using Font Book. And, in any case, you should be able to just go to non-System folders and just delete the fonts.
 
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davidlv

macrumors 68020
Apr 5, 2009
2,291
874
Kyoto, Japan
With the recent download of MS Office and Libre Office, it seems that I have way more fonts than I need. I tried to disable some of the non-English fonts in the Font Book app, but virtually every font had the "Disable XX Family" grayed out.
Is there any way to reduce the number of fonts I am inundated with when I work in Word, Excel, etc.?
Thank you for your time!
Refer to this post; http://www.jklstudios.com/misc/osxfonts.html, for an excellent article on fonts in osMac.
Font book does have a "search for duplicate fonts" function that can be used to fix the duplicates installed by Office, but I have found that I had to delete (first copy to a backup folder elsewhere) many fonts in the Library/Fonts folder in order to shorten the font lists in Word and Excel to something more reasonable. How often (no disrespect intended) do you actually use Arabic, Cherokee, or Polish fonts, etc.? The issue of whether or not a font can be safely deleted gets seriously more complicated when you use an Asian language along with English, such as Chinese or Japanese. Some Japanese fonts for instance, are used for system menus etc., and that can vary considerably depending on the OS version.
Happy font hunting! :cool::):cool:
 
Last edited:

NoBoMac

Moderator
Staff member
Jul 1, 2014
5,875
4,472
The issue of whether or not a font can be safely deleted gets seriously more complicated when you use an Asian language along with English, such as Chinese or Japanese. Some Japanese fonts for instance, are used for system menus etc., and that can vary considerably depending on the OS version.

This.

Been a while since I've dived into the font arena, but back in my Hackintosh days, the font deleting was a big thing for netbooks due to their disk sizes. And as mentioned, seen threads where deleting the wrong Asian font would mess up UI. Maybe better now in newer MacOSes, but, tread lightly for those that want to go there.
 
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