I'm a Type-aholic

One of the downsides of a life as a graphic designer is that my Mac has a lot of fonts installed. Partly from past work assignments, and partly because I’m a sucker for a pretty typeface at a knockdown price.

Can I remember which are in the first group, and which are in the second? Not really. All I know is that I’ve probably not called up more than half of the fonts in my user library in years.

I’ve been prompted to take a long, hard look at my Font Book lists because I’m now having to use Microsoft Word again for work, and it keeps popping up a warning that it can’t load all of the fonts. I can — and have — ignored that in the past, but it’s really bugging me now!

To be honest, I should really let my Monotype Library Subscription take more of the strain of loading up fonts when needed (via the SkyFonts app), and let go of most of the other fonts I’ve got cluttering up the lists.

For now, I’m disabling those fonts that I know I won’t be needing any time soon, and hopefully at some point Microsoft Word will be mollified.

(Of course, it’s the only app on my machine that makes that complaint, so it’s really Microsoft’s problem not mine, and I’m only using Word for copyediting and proofreading, not page layout — however, I know from bitter experience that Word can get twitchy and unpredictable if it doesn’t have exactly the right fonts to display the document.)