Typeface options

[vitor]

What? Actually it is not only a good idea but necessary for people who (like me) do a lot of cartography and design work and have literally tens of thousands of fonts that I need access to on occasion. Having them all enabled all the time is a needless slowdown on my system. When troubleshooting printing problems fonts can also be troublesome so knowing how to safely disable and re-enable fonts is something every use should know how to do. The only danger of disabling fonts is if you muck about in the font directories and move and/or throw away the font files. 

 

 Alfred just needs a warning to reenable a font it needs and/or the ability to fallback to a default font in the meantime.

 

Well, in fairness, there’s an important distinction between a good idea and a necessity. Most people don’t need to and shouldn’t disable default fonts. Note there is also a difference between default fonts the system needs (/System/Library/Fonts/) and default fonts the system simply ships with (/Library/Fonts/). The former should definitely not be messed with unless you have both a strong reason and a strong understanding of the consequences. Every other font directory is fair game, though.

 

As a graphic designer (can’t speak as a cartographer) I’d also argue having tens of thousands of fonts isn’t in itself a good idea, disabled or not. There aren’t tens of thousands of good (or even acceptably well constructed) typefaces in existence, so most of those are, without question, junk. Naturally, I have no context on your work specifically so your position may indeed require it, for some strange reason. But that’s a matter for another discussion, I mostly wanted to comment on the disabling/enabling of fonts.

 

Further reading on OS X font directories: Mac OS X: Font locations and their purposes.