Install and remove fonts without restarting apps

Aug 03, '05 09:23:00AM

Contributed by: buddha001

Here's another "WOW! I can't believe I missed that" hint. I don't know when this was introduced (10.3, 10.4,?), but it seems that you no longer need to restart applications when you install new fonts.

For those of you new to the Mac, I'll give some background. Back in the day, if you were using a program and suddenly discovered that you didn't have the font you needed installed, you had to save your work, quit the app, and add the font to your system. If a font was not in the Fonts folder when the application started up, it would not be loaded. All of this was a pain, especially for those of us who do graphics work. But it seems this has changed.

Today, while at work, I though I'd try installing a font and see if it came up in the app while it was running. To my surprise, it worked! So far I've tried it in After Effects, Photoshop, and Microsoft Word. For the Adobe apps, it did take a second for the new fonts to appear, but when I pulled the fonts out of my font folder, they stopped showing up in the applications. Word did not update its font list, but when I typed in the name of the font, it did change the text in my document. I'm not totally sure this works in all apps, but it looks promising.

[robg adds: I also hadn't realized that font changes were dynamic; I've been quitting/relaunching apps whenever I made a font change. I did some testing, and this seems to work in both 10.3 and 10.4 (I can't test anything earlier than 10.3), and it does seem to work, in some fashion, in most every application.

As noted above, Microsoft apps are a bit more difficult about it. I tested Excel 2004, and when I chose a 'removed' font, the cell appeared blank (though the text was still there -- changing to another font made the text visible again). When I re-added the removed font, sometimes I could use it right away, sometimes it took a few minutes, and at other times, I had to change the font size in the cell to make the text visible again.

Cocoa apps worked great; if you have the font panel open, the removed/added fonts will disappear/appear almost instantly when you make the change in the Finder.]

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