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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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MacOS (at least 2023 and younger): solution for (TrueType) fonts added through MacOS built-in Font Book not showing up in Pages or Preview

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/01/05

It took me a few queries to find the correct online solution for this problem: after adding a TrueType (and it’s extension: OpenType) font using the built-in MacOS Font Book, they do not show up in Pages or Preview, not even after validating the fonts in Font Book.

Solutions:

  1. reboot (found this out myself)
  2. killing the fontd font daemon from the Activity Monitor
  3. restart font daemon (found out via the link below)
    launchctl kickstart -k gui/`id -u`/com.apple.xtyped

The last one does not work on my Apple Silicon machine, the first two work fine.

For Preview, you have to Force Quit it then start it (so it re-opens all the previous files) to take effect.

I needed this, because I

Solutions

All from [Wayback/Archive] Newly installed fonts don’t appear in Pages’ font menu on macOS — TypeDrawers

IIRC this behaviour of fonts not showing up immediately started with macOS 13. A reboot should make the fonts appear in the menus.

…

Thanks everybody for your suggestions. Turns out @Jens Kutilek‘s trick was the one that worked: reboot the machine, and the font is finally there. Indeed it seems like this started with 13 (Ventura). How very inconvenient! Also it seems it is out of our control then. Makes me nostalgic that “turn your computer off and on again” is still a fix in 2023!

…

Some further investigation shows that quitting the fontd daemon (the “Mac OS X system font registration manager”) makes the font show up. Right after killing the process from the Activity Monitor, fontd will restart and presumably take stock of which fonts are currently installed.

A little less annoying than having to reboot!

[Wayback/Archive] ie2v2fp7z8rt.png (2164×1052)

…

I’ve reported it during the Ventura Beta, but the issue is still ‘Open’ without any response. Perhaps if more users report it they may try to fix it.

If you want to restart the fontd daemon using Terminal you can use the following command:

launchctl kickstart -k gui/`id -u`/com.apple.xtyped
This will tell the daemon manager (launchd – ‘daemons’ are just background processes) to restart fontd for the current user (id -u). You can use it in a script so you don’t have to manually open Activity Monitor and look for/kill the fontd process.
It’s interesting that only Apple apps seem to have this bug (TextEdit/Pages/Numbers/Keynote). The regular font APIs for developers don’t seem to be affected. I suspect that the Apple apps use the ‘English’ list for the font picker and this list isn’t updated automatically.
The default font picker (Format › Font › Show Fonts) shows activated fonts right away in the ‘All Fonts’ list, but not in the ‘English’ list. After restarting fontd the same font will show up in the ‘English’ list.

…

Another workaround: it seems like you can add any non-Latin secondary language to your macOS System Languages, which will force Pages/Keynote/Numbers to show all fonts in their font dropdown (instead of just English fonts). Assuming your primary system language is English, or uses Latin script:
  1. Go to System Settings › General › Language & Region
  2. Add a single secondary non-Latin language, e.g. Greek (or Japanese/Hebrew/Russian etc.)
  3. Open Pages
The Pages font dropdown will now show all fonts, including foreign language fonts. And when you activate a font it will immediately show up in the font dropdown.
TextEdit unfortunately doesn’t work with this trick — the font dropdown keeps displaying the English (primary language) font collection, which isn’t updated when you activate fonts.
If you don’t want to add a secondary system language you can also temporarily adjust the languages by launching Pages using Terminal:
/Applications/Pages.app/Contents/MacOS/Pages -AppleLanguages "( en, el )"

That will open Pages in English and the font dropdown updates correctly when new fonts are activated.

Unfortunately it looks like this bug is still present in the macOS Sonoma betas.

Related

Queries

Macintosh 30th anniversary

I got the fonts from [Wayback/Archive] Apple – Thirty Years of Mac.

Back then I blogged about it at Mac@30 follow-up on Happy 30th birthday Mac! Videos, fonts, links, etc (via: The Wiert Corner)

The the fonts and the site are partially in the Wayback Machine and even less in Archive.is (the live links below are dad):

Wayback Machine:

Archive.is: archive.is/http://www.apple.com/30-years/*

Other coverage: [Wayback/Archive] How to Get Apple’s Hidden 30th Anniversary Macintosh Icon Font

--jeroen

This entry was posted on 2026/01/05 at 18:00 and is filed under Apple, Font, Lucida Console, Mac, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, macOS 13 Ventura, macOS 14 Sonoma, Power User. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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