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Apple Font Book is a spinning wheel of disaster

8 years ago from , Front-end Engineer at CyberGRX

Ever since upgrading to Yosemite, I've had nothing but problems using Font Book.

  • Creating and switching between collections causes huge slowdowns.
  • Viewing a Smart Collection causes the app to hang 100% of the time, and must be force quit.
  • Viewing different fonts and styles takes much longer to load than before.
  • Having added a font to my library today, I can no longer launch it without it hanging on start. Now it's completely unusable.

Anyone else having huge issues with it?

30 comments

  • Daniel WhyteDaniel Whyte, 8 years ago

    A good font manager is on the list of apps I want to make, not just a manager but something that creates a really nice workflow.

    4 points
    • Geoff RogersGeoff Rogers, 8 years ago

      Please, make it! Like someone else said above, $10-20 feels like a sweet spot. I'd pay that almost without thinking for an app that just does the basics well.

      2 points
  • Eli SladeEli Slade, 8 years ago (edited 8 years ago )

    How much money would you be willing to pay for a good font management app?

    3 points
  • Mattias JohanssonMattias Johansson, 8 years ago

    I don't have a clue regards optimization of this crazy app but nowadays I only install the weights I need. Otherwise it's hard to keep the collection clean. I don't really want to install a third party app but man this is a painful app :)

    3 points
  • Mark ListerMark Lister, 8 years ago

    Just to add my tuppence. I had issues with Apple Font Book, so I switched to Monotype Font Explorer X. It is a paid for app but it is bullet proof and gives you loads of flexibility. Works flawlessly in Yosemite.

    https://www.fontexplorerx.com

    1 point
  • Josh ClementJosh Clement, 8 years ago

    I've never had a pleasant, fast experience using font book - whatever version OS

    1 point
    • Andy MerskinAndy Merskin, 8 years ago (edited 8 years ago )

      It's a bummer... there are few to no great tools for managing fonts anymore with the death of FontCase and Fonts from Bohemian Coding.

      I've been thinking of making a simple font management app using Atom Shell / node / Angular. Yet another side project that really needs doing. >:)

      3 points
  • Javin LadishJavin Ladish, 8 years ago (edited 8 years ago )

    I'm in the same boat. It's been a major headache and causing problems in all sorts of places.

    I've started turning off a lot of my user installed fonts and I think that's helping with the slowdown associated with the problems.

    Try disabling the fonts you don't use on a daily basis (out of the fonts you installed) and see if that helps at all.

    1 point
  • Tristan HarwardTristan Harward, over 7 years ago

    And what no one answered, you should try deleting your ~/Library/FontCollections folder. You'll have to recreate your collections, but it fixes the crashing. Apparently they can get corrupted. If you really want to keep your collections, then just move the files out of the folder, re-add them one by one until it crashes, and delete the one that caused it to crash.

    0 points
    • Andy MerskinAndy Merskin, over 7 years ago

      Good to know! I have since reinstalled OS X when El Cap came out, but if I run into anymore issues, I'll try this. Thanks for the tip!

      0 points
  • Micah SivitzMicah Sivitz, 8 years ago

    Does anyone know the technical reason why these apps always take up so much CPU?

    0 points
    • Andy MerskinAndy Merskin, 8 years ago

      My guess would be the various ways its having to render those many fonts, not to mention loading them from disk and processing different formats, displaying them, etc.

      I imagine it'd be a lot like opening 300 Adobe Illustrator documents at once. I wouldn't even want to put my computer through such a daunting task.

      0 points
      • Micah SivitzMicah Sivitz, 8 years ago

        Good point but it seems like there would be an easy solution to load them asynchronously. Either these programs don't do that or there is something else going on there.

        0 points
        • Andy MerskinAndy Merskin, 8 years ago

          Yeah, it's hard telling what the issue is, but it seems to be pretty common across font apps. :/

          0 points
  • Sam SolomonSam Solomon, 8 years ago

    I really have a difficult time why there is so much of a hassle around font management. Previously, I worked for an advertising agency and had hundreds and hundreds of fonts installed.

    For me it wasn't so much the amount of fonts, but how they are self organized. Proxima Nova had 3 sets (condensed and extra condensed) that each had 14 weights—all, which showed up as individual font families. I had to open them in font forge and manually rename all the families to keep myself sane.

    0 points
  • Ben MJTBen MJT, 8 years ago

    Such a huge gap in the market for a good font app, I'm amazed no-one has swooped in yet. Fontcase from Bohemian was a great effort, but it was mired in bugs. Echoing other comments, I would happily pay £10-15 for a good one.

    0 points
    • Dean HaydenDean Hayden, 8 years ago

      Gap already filled by FontXplorer and Suitcase, they're just outside of that £10-£15 price point. Be great if someone made something cheaper but they have big shoes to fill

      0 points
      • Ben MJTBen MJT, 8 years ago

        Oh I meant a gap for nice, thoughtful, lightweight software, in the mould of Fontcase. I've tried the two you mention and they're just not what i'm looking for.

        Suitcase had the particularly endearing habit of being the digital equivalent of Japanese Knotweed, just when I thought I deleted everything, it would pop up again weeks later.

        0 points
        • Dean HaydenDean Hayden, 8 years ago

          Not had any issues with Suitcase as of yet but that could change with software / os updates. If I need to get rid I'll make sure I do a thorough job. Whilst Fontcase was nice to use it wasn't stable enough, hence sticking with Suitcase

          0 points
  • Thibault MaekelberghThibault Maekelbergh, 8 years ago

    I'm using Fonts by Bohemian Coding. Nicer UI, better overall.

    0 points
  • Stephen MeszarosStephen Meszaros, 8 years ago

    I might be in the minority here, but I haven't had too much of an issue. Mainly because I've only got about a dozen of my fonts installed in Font Book. Once "upgrading" to Yosemite I took the approach of only adding fonts that I needed on a per project basis.

    That said, I'm curious, how many fonts have you added to Font Book?

    0 points
    • Andy MerskinAndy Merskin, 8 years ago

      About 360 individual font files (considering styles and weights of various typefaces, not including System fonts). This is a lot, I'd say. But I do work on quite a few projects at once.

      I tried removing over half of these and still can't launch Font Book.

      0 points
  • Andy MerskinAndy Merskin, 8 years ago

    Something I've resorted to doing for my "font management" per se, is creating a Fonts Disabled folder in my ~/Library/ that holds the fonts I'm currently not using.

    It works, but not as magical.

    Still need something reliable that I can preview fonts with.

    0 points