Install on Mac Doesn't recognise most of my fonts

Bugs
1

Please include the flowing when reporting a bug:

  • Your operating system
  • Operating system version
  • FontBase version
  • What actions caused the issue
  • If possible, attach a screenshot

Mac OS 13.2
Fontbase 2.20.7
Have moved a folder of all my fonts from my old Mac to a new one. Added the Folder to FB and all the fonts are listed but hardly any are available.

Just says “These are not the fonts you are looking for” when you click on most of them whether they are TTF or PS which is very unhelpful

Its there a fix?

2

Hello @BrianH, thank you for your post and welcome to the forum :pray:
Could you please add some screenshots for what is happening to better understand the situation?
If I may clarify, did the old Mac have FontBase as well or the new machine is the first time you’re using FontBase?
TTF fonts should have no problems being displayed, we’ll do everything we can to fix the issue.
As for PS - I’m afraid FontBase only supports TTF and OTF fonts for now :pensive:

Thank you again,
Yuriy
FontBase Dev Team

3

Hi Yuriy

Thanks for the reply.

I think my issue is explained by 2 things:

  1. Fontbase doesn’t support PS yet - and most of my fonts are PS
  2. Although I bought my refurnished Mac apparently with Sonoma it was actually running an earlier system which might have caused issues.

I was using Font Explorer X on the old Mac.

For the moment sadly Fontbase won’t work for me - be great if it supported PS.

Best

Brian

4

Thank you for the quick reply :pray:
Seems like thing No.1 is the main culprit, thing No.2 shouldn’t have anything to do with fonts being displayed in FontBase as long as the font format is supported.
Very sorry for the inconvenience :pensive:

5

Hi Yuriy,

I tested FontBase on an iMac (macOS 13.6.9/Ventura) at work – I was using FontExplorerXPro formerly too – and I had very similar issues as BrianH reported.

There was a forum thread about laggish/poor performance of FontBase on macOS, but I can’t find it at the moment. There was stated that the performance issues were caused by too many font subfolders – which is exactly the way FontExplorerXPro was organizing its resources (i.e. fonts). Each font had its own subfolder, organized in alphabetically named folders (i.e /Users/$username/Library/Font Explorer X/A/Arial Bold/arialb.ttf) or something very similar (don’t remember the path right now and I’m not at the iMac at the moment).

I am aware that FontBase does not support PostScript fonts and probably never will – it’s just an assumption because almost all layout applications, PDF creating libraries (recently PDFlib used by the Affinity apps) and operating systems (most recently Microsoft Windows) drop the support – but OpenType and TrueType fonts should be recognized in spite of the subfolder issue.

I broke the test off, because of the performance problems and because only a small fraction of the (TrueType and OpenType) fonts previously available via FontExplorerXPro was recognized by FontBase (I don’t have exact figures but I guess it was 10 to 30 percent).

I hope this can be solved in the future.

Best regards
Michael

6

Hello @Michael_Z, thank you for your post and welcome to the forum :pray:
And a separate thank you for the additional investigation of the issue.
Depending on folder structure and machine hardware performance might indeed be an issue, especially on older FontBase versions. Are you using the latest currently available version?
Thank you again,
Yuriy
FontBase Dev Team

7

Hi Yuriy,

I used the latest version in my test. The hardware is not the most recent but still good to work with (iMac 27" from 2019 with a 6-core i5 Intel CPU, 16 GB RAM and 500 GB NVMe drive).

The forum post I mentioned is this here: High CPU usage when idle

I abandoned the test of FontBase because of the described issues, uninstalled the software and use Typeface instead: there was no problem at all to import exactly the same former FontExplorerXPro archive with hundreds of subfolders and several thousand fonts within a few moments. All have been recognized and are usable.

Thank you for assistance and best regards

1 Like