Please excuse me if this is a seriously n00b question, but is it possible to have too many fonts? (I know many fontaholics out there will immediately cry out "NO!")

About a year ago, I upgraded from a G4 tower to a Mac Pro, and I brought over the SATA hard drive I had been using in the old machine. It should have contained all the fonts I ever owned, but I'm still finding that I am missing fonts like Spumoni LP.

Anyway, I tried loading every font on my machine into Font Book, and now MS Word crashes almost constantly and has become unusable. And in InDesign, I seem to have more fonts than I can remember, or even ever hope to keep track of. And to top it off, InDesign will scroll through the massive list of fonts until the poor thing gets to the ones that start with the letter "T," and then the windowshade menu just goes to blank white.

I tried downloading the trial version of Suitcase Fusion from Extensis to see if it could help, but so far it's to no avail. This is a 2.8 GHz Dual Quad Core Xeon machine with 4 GB of RAM, which I would think should be able to chew up just about anything.

What have I done wrong here? Or should I say, how many things have I done wrong here? Many thanks in advance for whatever guidance you can give me!

Fonts are so much fun — if they behave. I have over 7000 on my iMac, roughly 900 active. Suitcase has not agreed with me for a long time, so I use the free version of Linotype FontExplorer X to manage my fonts. Looks and works like iTunes, only for fonts. Word is very fussy about corrupt fonts, and insists on checking it's font database every time it's launched. That's the biggest reason that I switched to Pages.

FontExplorer will let you group fonts, like iTunes playlists. It's not a great idea to keep all of your fonts active. I really need to go through mine and deactivate the ones I don't routinely use. Linotype now has a Pro version with a 30-day trial, but the free version is still available for down load here. I haven't upgraded, as the free version handles my needs.

You really should use a Font Management program if you have tons of fonts. Font Book is great for required system fonts but it does have its limits. I believe you need another font program when your collection hits the 200 mark (this is only my opinion!)

Word uses fonts differently than InDesign/Quark xPress does and this is where a good Font Management program is worth every penny you pay for it. Phyllis uses a great free version and I would suggest you start there.

Good Luck!

A slightly OT aside, font fans will find this Periodic Table of Typefaces kind of fun.

In the meantime, you might:

• Consider turning some of those fonts off/on as needed
and disable them using Font Book.

• You can make sets of fonts to turn off/on from within Font Book

• Be aware of where fonts are stored, they are not all in the same
place. You may have duplicates causing conflict.
Font Book will indicate duplicates

FYI:
Font Locations/Hierarchy:
• User only access: ~/Library/Fonts/
• Computer-wide access: /Library/Fonts/
• /Network/Library/Fonts/
• OS X: /System/Library/Fonts/
• OS 9: /System Folder/Fonts/

Other font locations:
• /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts (Do not remove AMT or Reqrd Folders)
• Microsoft app fonts: no telling where, location may depend on version
/System/Library/Fonts or Microsoft app fonts