Font Book

Finding font book

First off, you must FIND font books, it's an application.

I usually type Apple-Shift-A to bring up applications

Once you run font book it should look like this:

What font book does:

If you had trouble with fonts in OS X, you are not alone, font books biggest feature is "Add Fonts" in file.

It lets you add fonts for you, all users, and Classic. Note that if you add fonts for All Users, and want to use the fonts in Classic, you need to add the fonts using the Classic radio box as well.

The fonts that are loaded at the moment have dots by them.

Disabling fonts

Be carefull when disabling fonts that you think you don't use! In the old days, you could just leave the fonts that had city names, like Chicago, Geneva, Monaco.

Now it's not so simple, basically leave on Lucida Grande, Keyboard, LastResort, Helvetica and Helvetica Neue. If you do happen to turn some of these off, you might find that some applications don't work, or Safari won't start up!

Collections

You can group you fonts into Collections, just like itunes lets you group songs in collections. If you get say 100 fonts from someone, you can put all those fonts in a "collection". When you are not working on the project, you can disable the collection, then if you need to work on that project, you can turn it back on just to work on it. The real advantage here is speed. Most applications launch faster if there are not as many fonts loaded.

Suitcase:

If you have thousands of fonts, or get lots of fonts from lots of clients, don't bother with font book, just go out and buy Suitcase or Font Agent Pro. They let you keep the fonts in their original folders and open them up, instead of lumping them all somewhere in some comingled font folder.

Opera:

Opera is a very small, fast, full featured web browser for both Macintosh and the PC.

Some of its most noteable features are the easy search bars that you can configure, and the link bar that shows all the links on a page.

It has tabbed browsing just like Mozilla, and it blocks pop-up ads if you set it up in the preferences.

It will also fake servers into thinking it's internet explorer, so when microsoft makes its web pages ding you for using a different browser, Opera may still work.