1. 3rd party font manager
2. Manually
3. Through Font Book

We are using either MasterJuggler or Suitcase as our font management utility. These programs are fairly self explanatory and the manual is installed with the app so I'm not going to go into them here. There is no limit to how many fonts you can load in the system at once. Technically you can load the ENTIRE Adobe font library and it will work, but it isn't recommended. Some programs, most noteably Microsoft Word will die a horrible fate if you try to do this, but from the systems perspective you can load em all if you like.

Loading Fonts Manually:
Manually moving fonts is slower than using a utility, but can be done. One interesting aspect of OS X is that you can keep the fonts in subfolders within the font folders and the fonts will be found. One problem being reported is that sometimes applications are slow to update. When this is the case the workaround seems to be quitting the application and relaunching it.

FontBook:
FontBook is Apples idea of font management. It's good for previewing fonts and lets you easily see font folder contents. But... DO NOT USE FONTBOOK!

FontBook lacks a database so it does not deal well with a large number of fonts. One of the biggest issues with FontBook is with it's default settings.

The two preferences highlited in green need to be changed if you try FontBook. First off, Disabling a collection turns off all fonts in the collection...DUH! Of course it needs to do that, why would you disable a collection but want the fonts still loaded? The other one is to always copy a font when installing. If you don't do this the font itself is moved to one of the active font folders, then when you deactivate it the font is deleted... no more font! D'OH!

Basically, we don't use FontBook and I couldn't recommend it to anyone.

Under the hood:
ATSServer is the Unix process that's running. ATSServer is responsible for:

1. Responsible for handling font requests
2. Notifies applications when font environment changes
3. Has an API (Application Programmers Interface) used by font managers to enable/disable fonts

Font Caching:
If you see a page with jumbled gibberish then you've got a font caching problem. The font cache is a double edged sword. The cache will speed up the display a ton, but if the cache gets out of sync with the rest of the system you could end up with your text looking like gibberish.

So.... how do you fix a font cache error? Restarting doesn't fix it, the cache is a load of files stored on the hard drive that has to be cleaned out. The list (as far as I've been able to find) where font caches live is:

1. System/Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS.System.fcache
2. System/Library/Caches/com.apple.ATSServer.FODB_System
3. System/Library/Caches/fontTablesAnnex
4. Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/501/Classic.fcache
5. Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/501/Local.fcache
6. Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/User.fcache
7. Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/Classic.fodb
8. Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/Local.fodb
9. Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/User.fodb
10. Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/FondResourceCache

The good news is some smart people wrote a utility that will hopefully clear these areas for you. I say hopefully cause if you run it and still see gibberish then you'll need to clean em out by hand. There are times where the file is marked as busy and I've had to boot to OS 9 to be allowed to remove some of these files.

The place and program I want you to run is called Font Cache Cleaner which can be downloaded from:
homepage.mac.com/mdouma46/fcache/fcache.html

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