Where your fonts go depends on their scope of reference as follows:
- /System/Library/Fonts — these are nominally fonts that are used by the system and like anything in the /System folder should remain where they are and neither deleted nor moved.
- /Library/Fonts — these are fonts that may be used by any user on the computer and in any application [*]/Users/deniro/Library/Fonts — these are fonts that are only available to the user deniro (On my systems this is an empty folder as I have no reason to limit any font to only one user.)
- The official OS X font list and locations for Mountain Lion may be found here. Apparently the Mavericks list is not out yet but I would expect it to be virtually identical.
Font Book turns fonts in the three font folders and makes them available to cocoa (object oriented) applications such as Pages, NeoOffice, Numbers, Keynote,
etc. and properly written procedural applications. Back in the OS X public beta, 10.0.x, 10.1.x, 10.2.x, and maybe even 10.3.x Font Books ability to turn fonts on and off was a big deal because there was a definite limit on the number of fonts an application could handle. Font Explorer was a third party competitor to Font Book that used a different method for controlling the active and inactive fonts and had the advantage of being effective for applications using procedural code that had not been recoded to recognize Font Book control. By the time OS X 10.4 (or maybe even 10.3) rolled around the limits on the number of fonts that could be handled in an application had disappeared and comments or questions about Font Book, Font Explorer,
et. al. virtually disappeared from the forums. Today the principal use of Font Book is verifying font files and folders to be sure they are not corrupted and identify/eliminate duplicate font files which can still cause problems and to organize or group fonts so the font list in applications does not become so long and unwieldy.
Personally Font Book has moved all my fonts to /System/Library/Fonts and /Library/Fonts and I have not needed any other font management tools for several years except on one or two occasions I have had a font go bad or from somewhere a duplicate font crept in and had to use Font Book. But I know of some users with 10 or 20 times the 329 fonts I have on my systems and I am convinced their experience is different from mine.
