Font Book finds duplicate fonts installed by Microsoft Office
Once you install Microsoft Office on a Mac, you get a bunch of new fonts. This is great, except many of them conflict with existing fonts that shipped with OS X.
- Open Font Book.
- Select all fonts in the middle column.
- File > Validate Fonts.
This is an example of what I'm talking about:
For every conflict the same font is located in each of the following folders:
- /Library/Fonts/
- /Library/Fonts/Microsoft/
Obviously, one way to resolve this conflict would be to choose one and remove the other. Or I could just leave it alone, since I really didn't notice the issue until just now when I tried validating my fonts -- they are the same fonts after all.
What are the pros/cons/considerations of each solution I've proposed? Is there a third way? How do you prefer to deal with this?
If you want to get anal about fonts you may find this PDF useful. It is by Extensis, the guys that make things like Suitcase Fusion and Universal Type Server/Client.
It is full of handy advice from a general viewpoint (i.e. not 'buy our product') and probably more information than you really want or need.
I'm not sure if it has been updated for Lion yet so tread carefully if you carry out any system font management on the basis of something in the PDF. I haven't used Lion enough yet to know how differently it handles fonts to 10.6 so will probably struggle to help if something goes wrong!
If you want to save space and remove the extra fonts, I'd recommend selecting everything, then right-clicking and selecting "Resolve Duplicates." I'm fairly sure Font Book favors fonts without any detectable bugs and with more characters, but in any case it will automatically disable any duplicate fonts.
I've not seen any information showing that the Microsoft fonts are superior in terms of kerning, quality, or cross platform compatibility, so I just delete them and prefer to keep the OS X fonts.