What's New in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther

Disclaimer: although I am an Apple Certified Trainer by day, this guide is not endorsed by or affiliated with Apple in any way, nor is it indicative of future Apple Training courses. It is based entirely on my own personal experience and research. Any inaccuracies are my fault. Comments and corrections welcome at f8dy@diveintomark.org.

Font Management: the new Font Book

Mac OS X 10.3 has a new font management utility called Font Book, located in /Applications/Utilities/. It allows you to preview, add, remove, fonts. You can enable and disable individual font families, or custom-defined groups of fonts.

The main Font Book window displays all your fonts and font collections. Selecting a font shows a preview of the font. You can change the contents of the preview under the Preview menu.

Also under the Preview menu, you can "Show Font Info", which gives information about the selected font's type, family, foundry, and copyright.

You can create your own font collections by choosing "New Collection" from the File menu, then dragging fonts into it from the "All Fonts" list. This works the same way as Playlists in iTunes and albums in iPhoto.

Fonts can be installed in several places in Mac OS X. Any user (even a standard user) can install their own fonts for themsevlves; these are stored in the Library/Fonts/ folder within the user's home directory. Administrators can install fonts and make them available to all users; these are stored in /Library/Fonts/. However, Classic applications will see none of these fonts; they will only see the fonts installed in the Fonts folder of your Mac OS 9 System Folder. The Font Book preferences window lets you set the default location for newly installed fonts.

You add a font by clicking the "+" sign under the font list, or by selecting "Add Fonts..." from the File menu.

Removing a font moves the font files to the trash and removes them from all user-defined font collections.

You can disable a font family by selecting the font and choosing "Disable font" from the Edit menu. Disabling a font leaves it installed, but it will not show up in the font panel. As far as I can tell, the only way to tell that a font has been disabled is through the Font Book application; there doesn't seem to be any indication in the Finder or in the Get Info window for the font file.

You can disable all fonts in a collection at once by selecting the font collection and choosing "Disable collection" from the Edit menu.

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