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User profile for user: Auctoris
Auctoris Author
User level: Level 2
179 points

System Font Not Appearing in Font Book; Still Works

I'm on macOS 10.15.4 so Iowan Old Style.ttc is located in the read-only /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/. It's there. I ran a validation on it, and it is perfectly fine. No problems.


Iowan Old Style displays properly in documents and web pages. I created a web page to make sure it was using my local font and not a woff. It is using the local font.


But Iowan Old Style does not appear in Font Book or the font-selection window for any application.


I made sure there were no other copies of Iowan Old Style on my machine. There aren't.


I deleted font caches. I rebooted in recovery mode and ran:

atsutil databases -remove


I rebooted back to my normal account, and it still did not work.


I trashed all font and Font Book related preferences. Still did not work.


I put a copy of Iowan Old Style.ttc in ~/Library/Fonts/. Nope, that didn't appear in Font Book either. I extracted the ttf files from the ttc file. Those don't appear in Font Book either.


I rebooted in safe-mode, logged into my clean admin account, and found that Iowan Old Style doesn't appear in Font Book for that account either. It must be a problem at the system level rather than the user level.


Does anyone have any ideas? I've exhausted all of the solutions I know of.


Thank you

MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.15

Posted on May 9, 2020 6:31 PM

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User profile for user: Auctoris
Auctoris Author
User level: Level 2
179 points

Posted on May 11, 2020 9:09 PM

I discovered that this is not a bug, it's a feature. Apple has a support article with a list of all of the fonts included in Catalina. They are divided into three categories, 1. Fonts included, 2. Fonts available for download, and 3. Fonts available for document support:


Fonts available for document support in Catalina

These fonts are available only in documents that already use the font, or in apps that request the font by name. Some are older fonts that were included with earlier versions of the Mac operating system or Apple apps.


And there they are, the list of fonts that are missing in Font Book and not available in an application's font-selection panel.


I have been using Macs exclusively since 1988, and this is the type of thing that had me avoiding Windows for decades. If Apple doesn't want to pay the licensing fees any longer (cause we know Apple is strapped for cash), then just get drop those fonts from the OS. It's just another layer of complexity to say, "You can use these fonts out of the box but you need to download these fonts and these fonts can only be used in pre-existing documents."


At the very least, display the fonts grayed out in Font Book with a note that they are for pre-existing documents only.


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User profile for user: Auctoris
Auctoris Author
User level: Level 2
179 points

May 11, 2020 9:09 PM in response to Auctoris

I discovered that this is not a bug, it's a feature. Apple has a support article with a list of all of the fonts included in Catalina. They are divided into three categories, 1. Fonts included, 2. Fonts available for download, and 3. Fonts available for document support:


Fonts available for document support in Catalina

These fonts are available only in documents that already use the font, or in apps that request the font by name. Some are older fonts that were included with earlier versions of the Mac operating system or Apple apps.


And there they are, the list of fonts that are missing in Font Book and not available in an application's font-selection panel.


I have been using Macs exclusively since 1988, and this is the type of thing that had me avoiding Windows for decades. If Apple doesn't want to pay the licensing fees any longer (cause we know Apple is strapped for cash), then just get drop those fonts from the OS. It's just another layer of complexity to say, "You can use these fonts out of the box but you need to download these fonts and these fonts can only be used in pre-existing documents."


At the very least, display the fonts grayed out in Font Book with a note that they are for pre-existing documents only.


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User profile for user: Auctoris
Auctoris Author
User level: Level 2
179 points

May 11, 2020 10:42 PM in response to dialabrain

Correct. I would prefer they simply pay the licensing fees and keep the fonts available system-wide. However, if they choose not to do that, then they should either make it clear in Font Book that these fonts exist but are unavailable for user selection, or they should get rid of them entirely.


Users should not have to wonder why fonts they have used heavily in the past display properly in old documents and web pages but are "invisible" in Font Book and unavailable for use in new documents. That doesn't "just work".

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System Font Not Appearing in Font Book; Still Works

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