Finding and removing Type 1 fonts on macOS

The goals of this article are to help you:

1. Identify Type 1 fonts installed anywhere on your Macintosh.

2. Archive those Type 1 fonts so you have access to them in the future if you need them.

3. Remove the Type 1 fonts from your system.

You might choose to identify and archive your Type 1 fonts immediately, but wait before you remove them from your system. (Here’s why.)

Normally, macOS stores fonts in three places:

• Main library: /Library/Fonts

• User library: /Users/<username>/Library/Fonts

  (where <username> is the home directory of the logged-in user)

• System library: /System/Library/Fonts

There could actually be more than three font locations, if there is more than one user account on the system. (Here’s how to deal.)

Since Type 1 fonts are usually not included with the OS but are instead installed by users, you will usually find them in User or Main libraries. You can’t install fonts in the System library and are’t likely to find Type 1 fonts there.

What you need

This article assumes that you are using macOS 10.9 or later. If you have an older version of macOS, some things described here may not be possible.

You will need to be using an Admin account.

You should be a little familiar with Font Book.

You also need to be accepting of the idea of using Terminal.

Type 1 file details

Type 1 fonts come in two pieces: a screen representation (bitmap) font, and an outline font, used to draw the font precisely for printers and some applications.

When you look at these files, the Finder refers to the bitmap font file as a “Font Suitcase” and the outline font file as a “PostScript Type 1 outline font”.

If a font comes with several styles or weights (like bold, light, or italic) then there will be one font suitcase but more than one outline font file—one for each font variation.

Both file types will incorporate at least part of the font name. Outline font file names will have no spaces and incorporate weight and style identifiers. Font file names ensure that all the files for one font can coexist without any naming conflicts.

For the Type 1 version of Adobe Garamond, the font suitcase is “Adobe Garamond” and the outline files are AGarBol, AGarBolIta, AGarIta, AGarReg, AGarSem, and AGarSemIta. You can probably guess that the variants are Bold, Bold Italic, Italic, Regular, Semibold, and Semibold Italic.

Other shortened variations include Alt (Alternate), Bla (Black), Boo (Book), Clo (Closed), Com (Compressed), Con (Condensed), Ext (Extended), Hea (Heavy), Lig (Light), Med (Medium), Obl (Oblique), Ope (Open), Pos (Poster), Rom (Roman), San (san serif), and Ser (serif).

Some fonts don’t have any variations. For the Adobe font Carta, which is a set of map symbols, the outline font file’s name is “Carta” and the font suitcase is “Carta.” (“Carta period”). This distinct naming means the suitcase and outline files can live together in the same folder.

Identify Type 1 fonts

Leverage the power of Font Book to identify installed Type 1 fonts.

1. Open Font Book.

2. Choose File > New Smart Collection.

3. For Collection name, enter Type 1 fonts.

4. For the selection criteria, choose:

   • All of the following are true

   • Kind is PostScript

   

5. Click OK.

6. Select the new collection in the sidebar.

   Here Font Book lists all the fonts that it identifies as PostScript Type 1.

7. Choose View > Show Font Info.

   The rightmost pane of the Font Book window will show details about any fonts that you select in the center pane.

   

Font Book sometimes gets it wrong

Your new collection probably includes some fonts that are incorrectly identified. This will typically include most of the fonts whose name starts with STIX (see Appendix: The STIX fonts). To verify whether the font is truly Type 1 or is actually an OpenType font, look at the Location detail in the Info pane. If the file name ends with .otf, then it’s an OpenType PostScript font.

Font Book populates a Smart Collection using a set of rules. You can’t remove individual fonts from a Smart Collection, but you can copy the fonts to a “regular” collection and remove the “false positive” OpenType fonts.

1. Choose File > New Collection and name the collection Real Type 1 fonts.

2. Select the original Smart Collection in the sidebar.

3. Select a font in the middle pane (it doesn’t matter which).

4. Choose Edit > Select All.

5. Drag the selected fonts to the new “Real Type 1 fonts” collection.

6. Review the Info pane for each font in the list.

   If the Location detail for the font shows a file extension of .otf, or if the Location shows a “Downloadable font asset” link, then you can remove it from the “Real Type 1 fonts” collection (select the font and press ⌫).

   Tip: Leave the families in the center pane collapsed and select each family for review. If the filename for the first font in the Info pane ends in .otf, then all the fonts in the family will be OpenType PostScript fonts, so you can delete the entire family from your “Real Type 1 fonts” collection.

Once your “Real Type 1 fonts” collection has only Type 1 fonts, you can archive them, then remove them from your system.

Archive Type 1 fonts

To copy your Type 1 fonts to a folder:

1. Open Font Book.

2. Select the “Real Type 1 fonts” collection.

3. Select all the families in the collection.

4. Choose File > Export Fonts.

5. Navigate to the Desktop and change the proposed folder name from “Exported Fonts” to Type 1 fonts archive.

6. Click Save.

The final part of archiving your font files is copying the folder to a safe location. Type 1 fonts have a secret that’s as old as the Macintosh: the bitmap font suitcase files use a resource fork. This part of these ancient files isn’t recognized by Windows PCs, disks that aren’t formatted as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”, and most file servers. If you rely on putting your archive folder in one of these locations, you’ll find that the size of the font suitcase files shows as zero, and that moving them has destroyed them.

Before you copy the “Type 1 fonts archive” to its final resting place:

1. Select the folder in the Finder.

2. Choose File > Compress.

The resulting file, “Type 1 fonts archive.zip”, will retain the precious resource forks of the font suitcase files. If you ever need to access the fonts again, copy the file to a Macintosh, then double-click it. The file will decompress to your “Type 1 fonts archive” folder which holds all your Type 1 fonts, including bitmap suitcase files.

Remove Type 1 fonts

Once you have identified and archived all the Type 1 fonts installed on your system, you can remove them.

Not so fast

There are two things to consider before you remove your Type 1 fonts.

If you have documents that use these fonts, and you intend to update those documents, you will need to have the fonts installed. You may be able to re-install them later, but you should consider leaving them installed until you have completed your document updates.

You might find it useful to create type specimens for these fonts, so that you have examples to compare against when shopping around for replacements.

Font Book makes it easy to generate PDF samples of fonts (Font Book calls them “reports”). The PDFs include the font in question embedded into the PDF itself, so it will always be visible, even on systems where the original font isn’t installed.

Font Book offers three report types: Catalog, Repertoire, and Waterfall.

We recommend creating a Waterfall report and a Repertoire report for each font. The Waterfall captures details about each font, and the Repertoire shows all the characters in the font.

To create a PDF report:

1. Select the fonts to include.

   If you select more than one font, each font will start on a new page in the report.

2. Choose File > Print, and click Show Details in the Print dialog.

   This lets you choose the Report Type to print. (The left side of the Print dialog shows a small preview of the report, and shows how many pages long the report will be.)

   • For Repertoire, use the slider to set the point size for the glyphs in the report.

   • For Waterfall, select Show Font Details.

3. To preview the output, choose Open in Preview from the PDF pop-up menu at the bottom of the Print dialog.

   You can then print or save the resulting PDF, or close it to return to Font Book.

Removing the Type 1 fonts

There are two ways to remove the Type 1 fonts from your Mac. They both involve using Font Book, and both require attention to what’s going on so you don’t remove the wrong font.

To remove the Type 1 fonts using just Font Book:

1. Open Font Book.

2. If the Info pane isn’t showing, select View > Show Font Info.

3. Select the “Real Type 1 fonts” collection.

4. For each family in the collection:

   1. Select a family.

   2. Click the library where the selected family is installed and scroll to the family.

      You can find which library the family is in by looking at the Location entry in the Info pane. If the path starts with “User” then the family is in the User library. Otherwise, it’s in the Computer library.

   3. Right-click the family in the middle pane and choose Remove <fontname> Family.

   4. When prompted, click Remove.

      If you are sure of your skills, select Do not ask me again before you click Remove.

Font Book moves fonts to the Trash, so if you select the wrong font, or forgot to archive your fonts, you can still retrieve them from the Trash. Please try not to rely on this instead of archiving your fonts and taking care deleting them.

To remove Type 1 fonts using Font Book and the Finder:

1. Open Font Book.

2. If the Info pane isn’t showing, select View > Show Font Info.

3. Select the “Real Type 1 fonts” collection.

4. For each family in the collection:

   1. Select a family.

   2. Right-click the family in the middle pane and choose Show in Finder.

   3. In the Finder, select View > as List, then select View > Sort By > Name. (You will only need to do this once.)

   4. Select File > Move to Trash.

      If you deselect the font files, return to Font Book, right-click the font family, and choose Show in Finder again.

The final step

Empty the Trash!

Type 1 fonts installed by other users

Other users of your computer can install fonts into two places: the common Main library (/Library/Fonts/), or their own User library (/Users/otheruser/Library/Fonts/). You have already identified all the Type 1 fonts in the Main library and in your own User library.

Accessing another user’s Fonts folder

Normally you won’t have access to another user’s Fonts folder. The following process will let you see another user’s fonts installed on your Macintosh.

1. Make the library visible

   macOS stores a lot of important files and folders in the Library folder. For good or bad, Apple has chosen to hide this folder from casual access.

   Open the Terminal application (it’s in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder).

   In Terminal, type:

   • sudo chflags nohidden /Users/otheruser/Library

   and press Return.

   Terminal will prompt for your administrator password. When you type, Terminal doesn’t display your password.

2. Gain read access to the Library folder

   In Terminal, type:

   • sudo chmod g+rx /Users/otheruser/Library

   and press Return.

3. Gain read/write access to the Fonts folder

   In Terminal, type:

   • sudo chmod g+rwx /Users/otheruser/Library/Fonts

   and press Return.

4. Open the Fonts folder

   In Terminal, type:

   • open /Users/otheruser/Library/Fonts

   and press Return.

   or browse to the folder through the Finder.

5. Quit Terminal.

Finding, archiving, and removing another user’s Type 1 fonts

You can’t see another user’s fonts using Font Book, so you need to browse through the folder using the Finder.

1. Make a folder on the desktop where you can archive the Type 1 fonts installed by other users.

   You may want to create one folder per user, so that you can manage them in the future if necessary.

2. Open the other user’s Fonts folder.

   If you followed step 4 in the previous section, then you have the other user’s Fonts folder open. If not, use the Finder to navigate to and open the folder.

3. Choose View > as List, then choose View > Sort By > Kind.

   This makes it easier to see the kinds of files that make up the Type 1 fonts.

4. Scroll the list to find files whose Kind is “Font Suitcase”. Select all these files, hold down the Option key, then drag the files to the archive folder on the desktop.

   Note: When you hold down the Option key, you will copy the selected files. If instead you just want to move the files, drag them without holding down any keys.

   This will remove the Fonts from the user’s library. Please tell the user that you removed and archived their Type 1 fonts.

5. Scroll to find files whose kind is “PostScript Type 1 outline font”. Select all these files, hold down the Option key, then drag the files to the archive folder on the desktop.

Cleaning up

When you have finished, it’s only polite to set the other user’s folders back the way you found them.

1. Start Terminal.

2. Type the following lines (press Return after each line):

   • sudo chmod g-rwx /Users/otheruser/Library/Fonts

   • sudo chmod g-rx /Users/otheruser/Library

   • sudo chflags hidden /Users/otheruser/Library

3. Quit Terminal.

After the first sudo command, Terminal will prompt you for your administrator password. When you type, Terminal doesn’t display your password.

Appendix: The STIX fonts

Starting with Mac OS X 10.7, Apple has included fonts whose names start with STIX. These fonts are from the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX). This organization’s goal is to provide a complete set of fonts for the scientific and engineering communities to use in online and print publications.

Font Book identifies the STIX fonts as “PostScript Type 1” although they’re OpenType PostScript fonts (there’s only one file per font, and it has the extension .otf).

Every release of macOS since 2011 has included version 1.1.0 of the STIX fonts. Starting in 2016, the STIX project has replaced these many font families with two families: STIXTwoText and STIXTwoMath.

The STIX fonts have a narrow audience. If you don’t use these fonts, you can remove them with no repercussions.

If you do use these fonts, you can go on doing so, and ignore the fact that Font Book misidentifies them as Type 1 fonts.

If you use the STIX fonts, you should consider downloading the latest versions and using them in all new documents that you create. You can gradually update your existing documents to take advantage of the new fonts.

Find more information and links to the latest versions of the STIX fonts at stixfonts.org.