[workerbee]

Before 10.5, I used FontAgent Pro to handle my fonts on OS X (ATM + Type Reunion before that...); now with Leopard I'm trying to keep OS X as "clean" as possible, and therefore am using FontBook to manage my fonts.

At first I foolishly dumped my few hundred OpenType and Postscript font families into FontBook, which then became extremely slow and unresponsive. I repented, manually purged each and every non-Apple font from my system, and only imported the two dozen font families I actually use into a new library in FontBook - if I understood correctly, that means the font files are then not kept inside /Library/Fonts or ~/Library/Fonts, but left on the disk, in my case in /Users/shared/Fonts/.

So far so good, FB has become responsive again.

However, there is one thing I don't understand: is FontBook actually doing anything at all?

I've set FB to not auto-activate fonts, and have disabled many fonts in FB, Apple fonts as well as some of my own: they are clearly marked "off" in FB.
However, all of these fonts still appear in each and every font menu I can find - in Apple Cocoa apps, on Omni Cocoa apps, in all Adobe CS3 Carbon apps... everywhere.

So what is FontBook actually doing? Nothing?!

Trying to get FB to act as I think it should, namely hide disabled fonts from applications, I have repeatedly deleted FBs pref file and the system font cache.

Can fonts that have "Computer" as default install location not be disabled?

[Kevin]

Well it disabled a font that was corrupted for me, and got rid of duplicate fonts etc. I wouldn't say it was as powerful as some other font Managers, but it's powerful enough for me.

[workerbee]

Ummm... and the "disable font" feature is just here as eye candy?
No, I think there must be something else at work here: this is not how it's supposed to work, it makes no sense.