Font Book

Typeface automatically imports your Font Book fonts and collections.

Managing your Font Book fonts

On launch Typeface automatically imports fonts that are available in Font Book, the standard macOS font application. This includes macOS system fonts as well as fonts you’ve imported into Font Book yourself. So if you’ve previously used Font Book to manage and import your fonts you’ll see all your fonts in Typeface right away.

Fonts you install using Font Book are copied to the macOS user font folder: /Users/<username>/Library/Fonts. This is a special folder that is monitored by macOS. Manually copying font files to that folder or installing using Font Book is technically the same. Any font file placed in that folder is automatically activated and available in all your applications.

While you can leave your font files in this user font folder, you may want to consider moving them to a different location. Since fonts located in /Users/<username>/Library/Fonts are activated by default you have to deactivate them manually using Typeface if you don’t want to use them right away (and to clean up the long font picker lists in your design apps). Font files located anywhere else on your Mac stay deactivated until you choose to activate them whenever you want.

Furthermore, the /Users/<username>/Library/Fonts folder is hidden in Finder and kind of hard to find. Since Typeface allows you to import fonts from any location you may like to move your fonts to a more accessible folder, where you can view and organise your font files however you like.

To create your own font location and move your user fonts from Font Book follow these steps:

  1. Open Finder
  2. Create your own custom font folder if you haven’t already done so, for example: /Users/<username>/Fonts
  3. Choose Go > Go to Folder, or press CommandShiftG
  4. Enter the following path (copy and paste) and press Go: ~/Library/Fonts
  5. Move the font files inside the Library folder to your custom font folder created in step 2
  6. Drag and drop your /Users/<username>/Fonts folder to Typeface to import the location

System fonts

Besides the user fonts folder there are two other special font folders on your Mac. The /Library/Fonts folder, which contains fonts installed by applications, and the system fonts folder /System/Library/Fonts. These fonts are available to all users on your Mac.

Both folders work the same as the user fonts folder: any font file located in one of this special folders is activated by macOS. The system font folder contains required macOS fonts that are protected and cannot be deactivated. Fonts located in the computer and user fonts folder can be deactivated using Typeface if you want.

Here’s an overview of the macOS font folders:

Hiding system fonts from Typeface

Don’t want to see all system fonts and other Font Book fonts in Typeface? You can remove the Font Book location from the sidebar to hide them.

Right click (or Control-click) on the Font Book item in the sidebar and choose Remove Font Book Source. Or toggle File > Import > Font Book from the main menu.

Note that the fonts will still be available in other apps, they’re just not imported into Typeface.

Importing Font Book collections

Typeface automatically imports all your Font Book collections at first launch to get you started. If you’ve changed your Font Book collections afterwards and want to reimport them you can do so by following these steps:

  1. Open Typeface
  2. Choose File > Import > Tags > Font Book from the Typeface main menu
  3. Confirm the imported collections

Your collections will be converted to tags and will be attached to currently imported fonts. The tags will be merged with your existing tags.


All articles