[Track_40]

Hi

I just bought my first mac and have a ton of questions....
I'll start off with two here.

Being a graphic designer I have TONS of fonts, prob about 1000 at the moment. I bought Suitecase XI (which i've used on the PC for years), but my question is, if I didn't have Suitecase, and I loaded all the fonts into the "system folder/fonts" folder, would that take up system resources similar to windows? Windows will load all the typefaces and make them ready for use - thus taking up memory. If I weren't using Suitecase, would the Mac do this too?

Also, what about for 'desktop' images? I think I saw a folder that held all the desktop images. If I add 200 images to this folder, will it take up any more system memory?

Be gentle... I know these may seem like lame questions.

[Brad]

First of all, assuming you are using Mac OS X and not some ancient machine with Mac OS 9 or older, you should never (and neither should Suitcase!) touch the contents of the /System folder. Things like fonts and such should go either at the top /Library folder or your home ~/Library folder. See my post here for an explanation as to why this is. Yes, it's long; just scroll to about half-way through. If you don't already know about this, you'll thank me later.

FYI, fonts can be stored either directly in the Library/Fonts folder or they can be nested deeper in a folder structure. For example, fonts that I have at Library/Fonts/Apple/Myriad are still picked up just fine.

I'm not sure about memory usage and fonts, though.

Desktop pictures can be stored anywhere you want them. Apple's default location is Library/Desktop Pictures, but you don't have to use that. In the System Preferences under Desktop & Screen Saver, you can click "Choose Folder..." to browse a different folder in the preview area. Alternatively, you can just drag an image file from anywhere in the system to the image well and it'll take it. However, dragging something to the image well doesn't create a copy of it. So, if you set ImageX.jpg to be your desktop picture and then delete it, then next time you log in it'll reset to the default.

See this about the image well. And don't forget you can drag proxies too.

[FFL]

Originally Posted by Track_40 Hi I just bought my first mac and have a ton of questions.... I'll start off with two here. [snip] Be gentle... I know these may seem like lame questions.

Don't worry, we (generally) don't flame people for asking tech questions (lame or otherwise) around here. Yet Another Thing you'll like infinitely more about Macs, than PCs.

[Kickaha]

You can also use the included FontBook application to enable/disable fonts. I have a couple hundred, and it works fine, but I know of graphics pros that state they find it cumbersome when the number of fonts hits a thousand or so.

Re: Memory use; I can't see that I've seen a difference, but I also can't claim to have investigated it much. I *believe* that the only font info kept resident is the font list, and fonts are brought in only as actually utilized. There's a font caching system used for speed. But... in general you can forget about the memory issues you're used to. The virtual memory in OS X is incredibly robust and efficient.