Here’s a quick tip for decluttering your font menus in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign by hiding the Noto fonts. The intent behind the Noto fonts is a noble one, namely to provide a global writing system composed of high-quality fonts for every written language. They’re also free to use anywhere, available under the Open Font license. Sounds great, right? But the problem is that Apple thinks these fonts are so great, and so essential, that they now come installed in macOS and cannot be uninstalled. At least not without some serious (and for most mortals, seriously perilous) system brain surgery via Terminal. Nor can these fonts be disabled with font management software. That means if you’re using a Mac, you now have over 100 Noto fonts clogging the font menus of your programs that you can’t turn off, even if you never need or want them. So, you might have to set aside a chunk of your day to scroll from NewsGothic to NuevaStd. I’m exaggerating, but only a little. 
If you’re the kind of person who likes to browse through your fonts to pick one, this gets tiring very quickly. It’s as if every time you went to your neighborhood grocery store you had to park a half a mile from the door because the closest 100 parking spots were reserved for folks from every other country in the world. Because hey, you never know when someone from three continents away might pop in for a quart of milk. Fortunately, all is not lost. There is a workaround. A couple, actually. One is very quick and easy, but it will hide other non-Noto fonts. The other is tedious and time-consuming but it will allow you to eliminate
Noto fonts with surgical precision. First, the easy way. Simply, use the controls in the fonts menu to filter by class. So, if you know you want a serif font, click that filter button. You’ll see only serif fonts in the menu. Ditto for scripts, handwritten fonts, etc. 
Clicking any class filter will hide the Noto fonts. In a bizarre but welcome twist, you can even filter for sans serif fonts and the Noto fonts (which are almost all referred to as “sans”) will be hidden. 
You just need to remember to un-filter the next time you want a different class of font. The second method is to use the Favorites feature. Just click the little star next to every font you do want to see in the menu. It’s on the far left in Photoshop font menu and the far right in InDesign and Illustrator. 
The lousy part is (as far as I know) there’s no way to select multiple fonts at a time to mark them as favorites. You can’t click and drag over a bunch. You have to click them one at a time, which is insanely tedious if you have a ton of active fonts. You’ll just have to decide if the one-time torture is worth never having to traverse the Noto Wasteland again. And by “never” I mean at least not till the next time you upgrade. Some users report losing their list of font favorites even though they explicitly chose to preserve settings and preferences in the Creative Cloud app. Sigh. But what the heck, it’s probably worth a lunch break, right? It’s a pretty brainless activity so you can just put on some music or a good podcast and star away. As a side benefit, you might also rediscover some cool fonts you forgot you had. And I wouldn’t totally rule out the idea that there’s a faster way to favorite fonts in bulk. The apps have to keep track of your favorites somewhere, so no doubt there’s a preference file containing that info. But where it is and how to hack it, I have no idea. At least now you know a couple of ways to “just say no” to Noto. PS: Some Mac users have reported success in hiding the Noto fonts with the Font Menu Cleaner app ($7.99).
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Try an app called RightFont from the Mac App Store. It’s like another version of Font Book but, through whatever magic, let’s you deactivate the Noto family of fonts. Just tried it and it worked (in Photoshop)!
Next target, all the foreign languages I don’t speak…
As James pointed out in an earlier email: Sad to say that Font Menu Cleaner no longer exists.
The developer explained: “In MacOS Ventura, Apple changed how the document support fonts are listed in the font APIs. For the most part, that corrected the problem with 3rd party apps. Unfortunately, at the same time Apple also disabled the ability to disable these fonts, effectively breaking FontMenuCleaner. For Ventura, that’s not a big problem because you wouldn’t really need the app in Ventura.”
Very happy Font Menu Cleaner user here. No problems!
I go to the Font Menu Cleaner page linked in the article and it says that it has been discontinued. No link to the existing version and no explanation.
I suspect this is because with Ventura, Apple has made it all but impossible to turn off, disable or even hide System Fonts.
Mike, please add me to the list of very happy Font Menu Cleaner users (macOS 12.6). Well worth the $7.99 price of admission.
I still mourn for the days of Adobe Type Manager, where one could easily turn on (or off) fonts in their menus and make custom folders there. Why this functionality is not available 20 years on in Mac OSX is beyond my understanding.
Hello,
I’m the developer of Font Menu Cleaner. Thanks for suggesting that people contact me directly if they have problems. As far as I know, Font Menu Cleaner works fine for most people. If it doesn’t, I would sincerely like to get more information about why. I can’t fix 3rd party apps, but I will do anything I can to make the Font Menu Cleaner experience better.
I am working on an update to Font Menu Cleaner right now. Any suggestions would be appreciated. I know that I need to add a note reminding people to quit other apps. 3rd party apps that show these document support fonts probably also don’t properly listen for real-time updates from the system font manager.
Personally, I think 3rd party apps actually should honour Apple’s built-in font management settings for font language and document support status. That way, if you do need some foreign language font, it will automatically be there when you need it, but won’t get in your way. Apple’s built-in font management features are really good. Apple just doesn’t force 3rd party apps to use them. That is the whole problem.
The system has metadata that identifies which languages a font supports. It doesn’t look for the existence of specific characters. Anyone creating their own fonts should be able to add any appropriate languages to the metadata. But now that someone mentioned it, I think it would be a great idea if I showed the supported langages in Font Menu Cleaner. Apple does show these in Font Book, but Font Book hides all of the document support fonts to begin with.
Mike, I couldn’t find a direct e-mail contact for you. Your Twitter link is broken and you don’t permit DMs. I would be happy to send you a free promo code for Font Menu Cleaner if you want to try it out.
John Daniel
Etresoft, Inc.
info@etresoft.com
Tried Font Menu Cleaner, does nót work…
That’s surprising since I think the guy invented it to hide Noto fonts. Have you tried emailing him to see what the problem might be? The only requirement I can see is that it requires OS 10.14 Mojave or later.
I always rely on http://www.jklstudios.com/misc/osxfonts.html
Alternatively, you might want to switch to a PC.
Amen!
Nope!
Ahhh, no! :-)
I have used the FontMenuCleaner app and it has got rid of most of the Noto and all of the Stix fonts (for example), and very easy to turn them back on if needed. Seems like a solution.
Thanks, Andrew. I’ll add that info to the article.
Nice one, Mike! Very worth doing this in during a lunch break.
People in the Apple forums argue that there’s a feature built into the system that can hide them. You just have to go for the language settings in Fontbook where you can set it to “English” and then everything but English is gone from the menus. Some apps (e.g. Pages) honor that. DTP software does not (and Apple fanboys argue that their users should just demand that DTP software finally should honor it as well).
The problem with that approach is of course international typesetting. As soon as you need to typeset something else in your job (e.g. several languages on a packaging design), the fonts you need for it will be gone as well.
And yet another problem: in German this setting is of course not “English”, but “German”. I just had the …. let’s call it pleasure … of a closer contact with the “German” setting. The system only recognizes a font as being “German” when it has umlauts and an ß ligature. So when you create a special dingbats font for whatever reason, it won’t be in the menu – often they only have a very limited set of glyphs and most of the time you don’t put them on the umlauts, because the font will then not be very accessible to international users.
System based favourites are a nice idea, kind of like a built-in font management, but in the case of Apple it’s just only half-baked and whoever made it at Apple doesn’t know what users need.
Have you try the FontMenuCleaner that can «hide» them? https://fontmenucleaner.com/
Haven’t tried that, but from what I’ve read nothing but filtering can hide them. I’ll be interested to try it. Thanks!