Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Catalina Fonts You Didn’t Know You Had Access To

Ralf Herrmann:

Apple has recently licensed fonts from type foundries such as Commercial Type, Klim Type Foundry and Mark Simonson Studio to be used as system fonts on Mac OS Catalina. But since these fonts are an optional download, many users of Mac OS X are not even aware they have access to them for free.

To see and install these optional fonts, open the FontBook application and switch to “All Fonts”.

Some highlights are Founders Grotesk, Produkt, and Proxima Nova. The full list is here.

Update (2020-05-28): David Isaksson:

You may also have a set of Druk by @commercialtype installed by the latest version of Pages/Keynote. Use a new template featuring Druk and it will install in Font Book automatically. Using this method will also unlock many of the other Catalina fonts for Mojave users.

Update (2020-06-02): Philipp Defner:

Not so great: You can’t download all of them at once.

“Why not just select multiple families while holding the Command key?” you might ask. This question is easily answered by giving it a try and observing how the CPU load is going up to 100% while the system grinds to a halt and the interface starts lagging after selecting more than 6 fonts.

5 Comments RSS · Twitter

When I try this, no matter which font I select, after about 10 seconds of choosing to download it I get a pop up alert that repeats in an infinite loop if I don't shut down the Font Book app: "The download failed. Please try again later."

This is amazing. Why don't they install these extra fonts by default? They constantly bloat up the OS with emoji, but fonts are actually useful.

Why don’t they install these extra fonts by default? They constantly bloat up the OS with emoji, but fonts are actually useful.

My guess is if you did a survey, millions more would want Apple Color Emoji than all those fonts combined. (Heck, how many people even need Didot, Optima, Palatino, etc. to be installed?)

Lanny Heidbreder

Font Book performance has been atrocious for at least a decade. I got my first Mac in 2009 and was grumpy about not being able to use it to manage large numbers of fonts almost right away.

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