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According to Font Book, I have 260 fonts installed on my system. Many of them are for languages which do not affect me.

Three such fonts are Al Bayan, Al Nile and Al Tarikh, Arabic fonts which I do not read.

I have tried to disable some fonts, but I get the message:

enter image description here

The selected fonts cannot be disabled.

The current selection contains protected fonts, which cannot be
disabled. Please unselect these fonts and try again.

I understand that I can probably delete them.

Why can’t I disable them? Is there a potential problem if I delete them (or move them to an archive folder)?

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  • Enumerate some of the fonts this happens with, add them to your original question.
    – Steve Chambers
    Commented Apr 1, 2019 at 12:51

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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The fonts you are trying to disable are used by the System and hence are protected. You could still try to delete those fonts but I would not advise that.

I suggest you start over and try deleting one font at a time. if the font you try to disable is dimmed out then it is a system font. Use the disable button in font book to diable the fonts. This is shown below.

enter image description here

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  • The only dimmed out fonts I have are the ones which are already disabled.
    – Manngo
    Commented Apr 1, 2019 at 21:42
  • If you open Font Book and select Computer from left sidebar, you should see many fonts that are dimmed out.
    – Natsfan
    Commented Apr 1, 2019 at 23:00
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In recent years, Apple seems to have 'doubled down' on system fonts: making them even more numerous, and stopping any methods of disabling/de-activating/unregistering them.

Prior to Ventura, it was possible to de-register system fonts from the OS's font manager using third-party apps, but Apple removed the ability to do this from their API.

As of Sequoia, there are 763 system fonts, totalling over 550MB on disk, which cannot be disabled or removed. (The additional downloadable "system asset" fonts can be removed, but they have a tendency of wandering back home.)

Currently, there is therefore no way of removing/disabling/de-registering system-bundled fonts.

Send feedback to Apple if you'd rather have the option.

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