Font Book in Mountain Lion doesn't show User fonts?

Matthew Butterick

Font Book in Snow Leopard has a collection called "User" that lists the fonts in ~/Library/Fonts.

While Mountain Lion lets you install fonts in ~/Library/Fonts, Font Book doesn't display them.

Have others seen this? Determined a solution?

(I know that the ~/Library directory is hidden by default in Mountain Lion. I unhid it, but that didn't fix the Font Book problem.)

James Puckett

I don’t have an answer. But as long as we’re on the subject, does anyone have a connection to the Font Book developers? Every versions seems to cause new problems for type designers and we seem to have no way to communicate with the devs aside from posting on various forums and hoping things change later.

Mark Simonson

I'm on Mountain Lion, but I'm not seeing this behavior. The fonts in my user folder are showing up okay in Font Book.

Antonio Cavedoni, who spoke at the last TypeCon and is one of Apple's font guys, seems to be pretty accessible. I tweeted about a bug in TextEdit on Lion and got an email from him right away, and was able to get info to him to help fix the bug.

Jackson Showalter-Cavanaugh

I'm also not seeing this. My User fonts are there.

Ralf

I second that. Not a standard behavior in 10.8.
Have you tried starting Font Book from a different account on that machine?

Nick Shinn

I can never remember what beast whichever version of OS I have is supposed to be.
All I know is that every time the OS is upgraded it drives me up the fucking wall, and I lose functionality every time, so that it takes me longer to do simple things now than in the past.

I've had this latest OS for almost a year now and I still haven't figured out how to do a simple search. I'd like to search for "Fonts" and have a list of folders named "Fonts" show up.

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

It takes a while to display after startup, but after a few seconds, it does show up. Could also be because I have quite a few half-baked fonts installed. :-)

How do you install your fonts? In any event, don't drag them into ~/Library/Fonts/. Simply open them with Font Book instead.

Max Phillips

In any event, don't drag them into ~/Library/Fonts/. Simply open them with Font Book instead.

Why do you say this? I've been told the opposite.

Matthew Butterick

Have you tried starting Font Book from a different account on that machine?

Good idea. I created another user account and it worked fine. So I suspect this is a glitch related to using Apple's Migration Assistant to move my user account onto this new laptop. I discovered that the OS X username ('MB') is different than the username in the permissions for ~/Library/Fonts ('mb'), which can't be good.

In any event, don't drag them into ~/Library/Fonts/

Most of my font installation & updating is automated using this technique. I've never had an issue seeing everything in Font Book (so I guess I'm overdue for a problem)

Matthew Butterick

OK, I fixed it. Turns out my home directory was named 'MB' even though my actual OS X shortname was 'mb'. So I logged in as root, changed the home directory name to 'mb', and now my user fonts show up in Font Book.

Interestingly, I didn't have to change my user directory, which was listed as /Users/mb already. This is weird because unix systems are usually picky about case correctness. But indeed, the OS X filesystem is both case-insensitive and case-preserving:

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/22297/is-bash-in-osx-case-insensitive

That means that if you name a folder /Users/mb, you can refer to it as /users/MB, or /USERS/mB, etc.

Still, I'll blame Font Book for this problem, since it apparently requires case accuracy where the filesystem does not.