How to install a custom font on macOS

Of the four major platforms, macOS makes custom-font installation the most painless. There's a built-in app (Font Book) that handles the whole thing, and once installed every Mac app that uses the system font picker — which is most of them — can use your font.

If you don't have a .ttf to install yet, make one from your handwriting first.

The 30-second version

1. Double-click the .ttf file in Finder.
2. Font Book opens and shows a preview.
3. Click Install Font in the bottom-right.
4. Done.

That's it for the vast majority of cases. The rest of this guide covers the nuances — installing for all users, installing many fonts at once, and the most common warnings.

Install for yourself vs. install for everyone on the Mac

Font Book has two install scopes:

• User (default): the font is available only to the macOS account you're logged in as. Lives in ~/Library/Fonts.
• Computer: every user on the Mac can use the font. Requires an admin password and writes to /Library/Fonts.

You can pick which one when you install. Open Font Book → Settings (⌘,) → Default Install Location, set it to either User or Computer, and that's the default going forward.

For a personal Mac, User is the right answer. For a shared Mac at a small studio or family computer, Computer is more convenient than installing the same font under three different accounts.

Installing many fonts at once

Drag-select all the .ttf files in Finder, then drag them into the All Fonts panel of Font Book. Each one gets installed in one go. Useful if you've made a font family (Regular, Bold, Italic) or downloaded a free-font bundle.

You can also drag fonts directly onto the Font Book dock icon to install them without opening the app first.

Where the font appears after installation

Every Mac app that uses the system font picker (the one that looks consistent across apps) will see your font in its list. That includes:

• Pages, Keynote, Numbers
• TextEdit
• Notes (in rich-text mode)
• Mail (for composing rich-text email)
• Sketch, Figma desktop, Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher
• Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects — though Adobe also has its own font manager (Adobe Fonts), which is separate.
• Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel
• Final Cut Pro, Motion

A few apps maintain their own font list (Google Docs and Notion in a browser, for example), and won't see system-installed fonts. For those, you usually need to either use the desktop version of the app or work around it by embedding text as an image.

Troubleshooting

"Duplicate font" warning

If you've installed a font before — or if a previous version is still in /Library/Fonts — Font Book warns you. Click Resolve Automatically and it'll keep the newer version. If the warning persists, open Font Book, search for the font name, and delete the older entry manually.

Font installs but doesn't appear in app X

Quit and re-open the app. Most apps build their font list at launch and won't pick up newly installed fonts mid-session. Adobe apps in particular are stubborn about this — sometimes you need to also restart the Adobe Creative Cloud helper.

The font installs but renders incorrectly (clipped, missing letters)

This is almost always a problem with the .ttf file itself, not macOS. Open Font Book and click Validate Font with the font selected — Font Book runs a real OpenType validator and tells you which glyphs are malformed. If validation fails, regenerate the font.

Installing fonts from Terminal

If you're scripting font installs (CI, dotfile setup, etc.), cp the .ttf into ~/Library/Fonts for user-level or /Library/Fonts for system-level. macOS picks them up the next time an app launches — no daemon restart needed.

cp ~/Downloads/MyHandwriting.ttf ~/Library/Fonts/

How do I uninstall a font?

Open Font Book, search for the font, right-click it, and choose Remove. Or delete the file directly from ~/Library/Fonts and quit/relaunch apps.

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That's the whole story for macOS. If you're also on Windows or iOS, the Windows install guide and iOS install guide cover those platforms. Otherwise, head to the font maker and get something into your ~/Library/Fonts folder.