Anything that the system itself requires to operate will be found in "/System/Library/Fonts" or elsewhere in the "/System" folder. Mac OS X reorganized things and created the "/Library" folder precisely so that you would leave the "/System" folder alone. Anything you remove from "/System" is simply a request for your machine to give you lots of hard-to-track-down trouble, period.

(Yes, I realize 400 people may respond with "but I removed X and nothing bad happened." I don't care - they're wrong. The "/System" folder is for Mac OS X itself. That's why "root" owns all of it. Leave it alone.)

Anything in your personal fonts folder ("~/Library/Fonts") is discretionary, as is, technically, anything in "/Library/Fonts" (the machine-wide configurable fonts folder). However, applications that require their own fonts are supposed to install them in one of those two places (usually "/Library/Fonts"), and if those fonts are missing, those programs may not work properly or at all. Tax preparation and music notation programs may fail completely if their special fonts are not available; suites like Microsoft Office may try to "reinstall" Microsoft fonts if they're missing.

Go to your nearby Apple store, find a display system that is obviously little more than an out-of-the-box machine with demo software, take screen captures of "/Library/Fonts" and "~/Library/Fonts", and E-mail them to yourself. You should leave those fonts in place; use your font manager (or Font Book, if nothing else) to disable them if you don't want them cluttering up menus. Just keep in mind that some applications may require more.

The suggestion about the four basic fonts for the Mac OS 9 system folder is correct. If you remove outlines from that folder, you must at least keep bitmaps for Charcoal 12, Geneva 9, Geneva 12, Monaco 9, and Chicago 12 available to the system or it will not function. (If your Mac is an older one that can boot into Mac OS 9, it may not even boot if the latter four bitmap fonts are not available.)

Anything you remove from “/System” is simply a request for your machine to give you lots of hard-to-track-down trouble, period.

I agree. I think the most common way to run into trouble is if you have your own Postscript family of Helvetica, which obviously has many more variations than Helvetica.dfont. It could be that it is activated in a font manager which can override system fonts, or it could simply be that it is earlier in the font path, for example, in ~/Library/Fonts/. The effect can be the same in terms of application functionality. An application that uses Helvetica (and many do) will be using the Postscript version, which may not function as expected.

Usually, this isn't a problem, but I think that's what "hard-to-track-down" problems are all about. In a way, it is unfortunate that applications like Safari, iChat and Mail make use of Helvetica for display purposes, when users may have perfectly valid reasons for using their own versions. For example, people commonly have older documents that were created with Postscript versions of Helvetica.

It is interesting to think of this in light of the Segoe/Frutiger controversy. Apple could have avoided this situation by somehow renaming their version of Helvetica, to say AppleHelvetica. Perhaps they couldn't because of licensing issues...

Does Apple give you **** medal if you delete Comic Sans ?

No but I could be convinced to make Comic for Dummies & Mummies..

Apple used to advertise their systems as being the "computer for the rest of us." I think that Apple page is an example of "documentation for the rest of us."

For some class of Mac user's, Comic Sans is a real necessity. I have relatvies that depend upon said typographical workhorse for posters, fliers, recipe books and resumes every day.

I think the documentation only implies that you can't disable CS with FontBook. I tried it, and it disabled, so it's really unclear what those lists mean.

You don't need anything in Library-Fonts or User-Library-Fonts.
Adobe installs a ton of fonts in Library-Application Support-Adobe-Fonts, you don't need any of them except definitely do NOT delete the Reqrd folder.
Then there's the wonderful Adobe fonts in User-Library-Application Support-Adobe-Fonts. Ditch them.
Microsoft also likes to install a bunch of fonts in System-Fonts - most of these you don't need.

The list is bogus. I have a really stripped down version at work and when I get there I'll post it…

My head is spinning. Does anyone wonder why we complain of font management in OSX?

peace

I presume the reason Comic Sans is listed as being required is because if it or any of the other Web Core Fonts are disabled/removed, Microsoft Internet First Run will reinstall them (in ~/L/F) next time you launch Internet Explorer, and you'd end up with copies everywhere. Someone, however, seems to have forgotten to tell the documentation writer that IE no longer ships with the OS.

I just yesterday went through with FontBook and disabled everything that I've not used in the past 16 years, leaving a bare minimum of CJK support:

.Aqua Kana
STHeiti (for Chinese)
Hiraganu Kaku Gothic Pro (for Japanese)
Apple Gothic (for Korean)

I'm now down to 90 visible fonts installed with 21 active, the only User one being Gentium. I've been running with no Arial installed for years without problems :)

Fisheye, currently the system will load the Finder with only LucidaGrande.dfont active. Most Typhiles use their computers for doing actual work, using one or more applications. Depending on how you use your applications the fonts necessary might be different. Some applications might assume that certain fonts are active, which is why your suggestions are not very useful. This is particularly important when discussing language support.

I think I first performed the procedure you described in 2001.

I disagree. Completely…

peace