It is worth noting that the font caches themselves can become corrupted and cause slowdowns or crashes on your Mac so if you experience problems because of this it is a good idea to force OS X to rebuild the font cache. It is also a good idea to enable Automatic font activation in Font Book’s Preferences as it lets OS X re-enable fonts when an application needs it. You can automatically disable duplicates by using the Look for Enabled Duplicates (or Select duplicate fonts on Snow Leopard), followed by Resolve Automatically option (or Resolve Duplicates option in the Edit menu on Snow Leopard). Damaged or duplicate fonts can also slow down your computer so while you are in Font Book select Validate Fonts from the File menu and verify that the fonts you have installed are okay.

Give it a few seconds to load your fonts then go through the list and disable the ones you don’t use by selecting Disable from the Edit menu. So how do you disable fonts? You can use the application Font Book that comes with your Mac (you find it in Applications).

By disabling some of the extra fonts we can reduce the time applications have to spend on managing fonts.

As an example a quick scan of this computer shows that there are over 450 fonts installed, but typically only 20-30 are ever used. After this, every time you want to change the font the application has to load these previews and display them to you, which in Microsoft Word can takes up to five seconds from the clicking the font menu until it actually displays the font list.īy disabling unnecessary fonts you can speed up applications quite significantly. For example, every time Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word or QuarkXPress starts, the application scans your fonts and builds a preview for you. While it may seem like a minor thing it can actually have a big impact on how fast and responsive applications are. One often-overlooked tweak is to clear out the font caches and trim the number of fonts you have installed on your Mac. Adobe Photoshop Cocktail Font Book Microsoft Word QuarkXPress Tips & Tricks Troubleshooting

Mac fonts list