From The Labs: Mystery of Snow Leopard’s Shrinking Font Book Solved
Our lab tests today have conclusively revealed the reason that Snow Leopard’s Font Book application is so small.
One of the main “features” of Apple’s nascent operating system is the reduced size of all the core OSX components. Graphs have been bandied about showing size decreases of 80%. Font Book, the ubiquitous “no-you-can’t-see-the-font-unless-you-click-on-it” program that allows nearly all Mac programs to slightly annoy consumers is one of those massively reduced programs, and we have disovered, in this case at any rate, how Apple did it.
The only font in Snow Leopard’s Font Book is Helvetica Neue.
“It was a tough decision,” remarked Jim Baxter, Apple’s SVP of fonts, while cleaning out his desk. “We had literally hundreds of fonts that have been clogging up OSX’s hard drives for nearly a decade, even though no one ever uses them. I mean, when was the last time you used Bank Gothic? Or how about Bernard MT Condensed? And those are just two choices from the “b” section! Really, we feel that Helvetica Neue is the only choice needed in the future. It’s light, professional, bright, and serious all at once. Also Steve told me it was going to be what we go with.”
According to our lab tests, users will be able to install other fonts, but they are no longer included by default. This mistakenly leads Adobe to believe that they will now be making thousands of sales of their professional fonts. We didn’t have the heart to tell them about free font web sites.
Apple was unlikely to comment, all things considered.
