All these fonts are stored in a ‘font’ folder inside your ‘library’ folder. The thing is, you actually have two library folders. One is here, on your main Hard Drive:

You can find it just by hard drive icon.

The other one is here:

It is in your users folder. You find it by clicking on your hard drive icon, then ‘Users’ then your username, and then you should see it in amongst your music, movies folders and so on.

Inside both of these ‘Library’ folders will be another folder called fonts, and inside the font folder will be all the fonts on your computer. The first fonts folder contains the fonts available to any user on your computer. The second one in your user directory contains just the fonts that are available to your user.

If you want to copy one of these fonts to a different computer you can just copy it like any other file. You can drag the font to a thumbdrive, e-mail it to yourself at a different computer, or copy it across the network to your laptop. On the new computer you simply need to double-click the font and you will get a little window showing you a preview of what the font looks like. There will be either a button saying ‘ install’ which will install the front onto that computer if you click on it, or there will be a little grey message saying ‘ installed’ which means that that font is already installed on that computer.

If you are copying a font be sure to copy all the different font files. For example in the following example the Arial font has quite a few files, one for the bold one for the italic and so on. It’s best to copy them all.

If you have trouble finding where a font is, there is a neat little application in your applications folder called ‘Font Book’ If you run it it will give you a list of all the fonts on your computer. If you control-click on any of the font names, there will be an option to reveal the font in the Finder, which will take you to the location of the font file automatically!

Most of the time the fonts will just work and you won’t need to worry about them, but every now and then you might go to open one of your documents on a different computer and the font will be missing. This is how to copy the font across.

If you want a document that you can open on any computer at all, and you don’t need to worry about whether that computer has the font or not, save your document as a PDF file. PDF files include the font in the file so they will work on any computer even if it doesn’t have the right font!

If you have a friend with a PC chances are they are sending you documents that use fonts such as Calibri, Corbel and so on. Some of them are quite nice. Here is how to install them on your Macintosh for free – Cambria, Calibri, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel and Candara.

First go to this page where you can download the Open XML Converter for Macintosh. This program allows you to open Office 2008 programs in older versions of Microsoft office. It also includes all the fonts for Office 2008.

So you can either run the installer and it will install itself, or if you are a bit uneasy about installing Microsoft products on your computer, right click on the installer and select show package contents. Open the folder called ‘Contents’ then ‘Packages’ then select ‘show package contents’ of the file that is called OpenXML_all_fonts.
Open the folder called ‘Contents’ then double-click on ‘Archive.pax.gz’

This will create a directory of all the Microsoft fonts and you can install the ones you want simply by double clicking on them.