Hi Gary! I noticed that there are a lot of fonts in Font Book that are in a language I don’t speak. I don’t see any reason for them to really be there and was wondering if there’s a list of fonts that the Mac needs in order to function.
I’m thinking of deleting or disabling these fonts so that they don’t take up room, I don’t have to parse through them when looking for other fonts. Also, is it like a PC in that the more fonts you have loaded, the longer it takes for apps/the OS to start up?
— Michelle
Font Book is smart enough to not let you remove critical fonts: Keyboard, LastResort, Monaco, Geneva and LucidaGrande. In addition, don't get rid of AppleGothic, Menlo, Helvetica, AquaKana, Times, Times New Roman, Comic Sans, Georgia, Trebuchet MS, Arial, Arial Black and Verdana. These are used by all sorts of applications. Some of these may not even appear in Font Book as they are core fonts, so not "manageable." They have to be there.
But in addition, you need to watch out for fonts that are installed by applications. If you get rid of one, then that application may not work right anymore.
In general, the slowness caused by having lots of fonts is a thing of the past. Better font handling in OS X and faster processors are a thing of the past. Sometimes applications create a font menu on startup -- a graphic list of all fonts to make it easy to select a font. But that isn't something you'd want to worry about too much. If an application takes a long time to launch, there are other reasons too. So just keep that application running in the background instead of quitting and launching all the time.
As for foreign language fonts, if you go to System Preferences, Language & Text, Languages you can see a list of which languages your Mac supports. You can also edit this list and remove them. I believe this will take the appropriate fonts with it.
My recommendation: Leave them alone. These don't take up much space at all, and won't slow anything down. And when you visit a Web page that uses them, it is nice to see the page as it is meant to, even if you can't read it, instead of a bunch of garbage characters.