Questions about FontAudition Desktop.

Before You Buy

• Do I need Final Cut Pro?
• What is it called on the Mac App Store?
• Is this the same app as FontAudition WFE?
• I want both. Is there a bundle?
• What do I need to run it?

What It Does

• What does FontAudition Desktop actually do?
• How is it different from Font Book?
• Can I preview my own text rather than a sample phrase?
• My text has accents or non-Latin characters. Will I see which fonts handle it?
• Can I save a shortlist?
• How do Collections actually work?

Fonts and Installing

• Does FontAudition install fonts for me?
• Can I browse fonts without installing them?
• Can I use fonts on an external drive or a font server?
• How do I add a font server or a NAS share?
• Does it come with any fonts?
• How does the Google Fonts browser work?
• What are the other free font libraries?
• Can I remove fonts I no longer want?

Working With Other Apps

• Which apps can I drag type into?
• Does every app receive the same thing?
• Which format does each app actually receive?
• Does it work with Final Cut Pro as well?
• Can I get a list of the fonts I picked?
• What does an exported font sheet look like?
• Where do I find a font's PostScript name?

Support

• What should I include in a support request?
• I bought the wrong version. What should I do?
• Does FontAudition change or move my font files?

No. FontAudition Desktop is an ordinary Mac app and runs on its own. Final Cut Pro is not required and is not involved. If you do work in Final Cut Pro and want font auditioning inside the timeline, that is a different product — FontAudition WFE.

Simply FontAudition. The Final Cut Pro version is listed separately as FontAudition WFE. This site says "FontAudition Desktop" to keep the two clear in writing, but "Desktop" is not part of the App Store name — search for FontAudition and check which of the two listings you are looking at before you buy.

No. They are separate App Store products and buying one does not give you the other. The difference that matters is whether it needs Final Cut Pro: WFE runs inside Final Cut Pro and will not launch without it; FontAudition Desktop runs on its own and works with the other apps on your Mac.

Yes — the two apps are also sold together as a discounted App Store bundle. If you already own one of them, you are not charged for it twice: Apple's Complete My Bundle feature credits what you already spent toward the bundle price, so you pay only the balance. Sign in to the App Store and the bundle page shows the price that applies to you. Both apps also stay on sale individually.

A Mac running macOS 15.7 or later. No subscription, no account, and no internet connection for the app itself — though downloading free fonts from inside the app does need one.

It shows the words you are actually setting, in every font on your Mac at once, at the size you are working at — then lets you drag the one you chose straight into the app you are designing in. Instead of scrolling a font menu and imagining the result, you compare real candidates side by side and pick.

Font Book is for managing fonts — installing, validating, organizing what is on your Mac. FontAudition is for choosing one: your own text rendered across the whole library at a size you control, filters that narrow thousands of faces to a handful, and a drag that carries the styled result into your artwork. The two do different jobs and sit happily alongside each other.

Yes — that is the point of it. Type the real headline, the client's name, the awkward word with the ligature in it, and the whole grid re-renders as you type. Presets are one click away for pangrams, the alphabet, numerals and currency, accented Latin and Lorem Ipsum, and your sample text is still there next time you open the app.

Yes, and this is where it saves the most time. One checkbox hides every font that lacks the glyphs for your sample, so a library of thousands drops to the ones that can actually set your words. Fonts with partial coverage stay visible and render what they can rather than filling the cell with placeholder boxes. Double-click any font for its full character sheet if you need to check a specific glyph.

Yes. Star fonts as you go and save the starred set as a named Collection — one per job, as many as you like, and they are still there next time. A collection can be exported as a PDF font sheet or as a plain-text list of font names to send to someone else. Deleting a collection never touches the fonts themselves.

Starring is how you build one. With All Fonts selected, the stars you add are a working shortlist — nothing is saved yet. When it looks right, use Save starred fonts as new Collection… in the Display menu and give it a name. From then on, selecting that collection in the Display menu filters the grid to just those fonts, and the stars you see are that collection's membership rather than the All Fonts shortlist.

That is the part worth knowing: stars belong to whichever collection is selected. So you can keep a client's shortlist starred in their collection without disturbing the scratch list you build under All Fonts. The Display menu also has Add starred fonts to existing Collection… to merge a new batch into an old set, Copy a Collection… to branch one, and Delete current Collection, which removes only the grouping — never the fonts.

There is no limit on how many you keep, and they survive quitting the app.

Yes. Choose File › Install Font Files… or drop font files or a folder straight onto the window, and they are installed for your account — available in every app on your Mac and visible in Font Book, not just inside FontAudition. Fonts you already have are skipped rather than duplicated. OpenType and TrueType fonts are supported, including collections (.otf, .ttf, .ttc).

Yes, and this is a deliberate distinction. Connect a folder as a font source and its fonts become browsable inside FontAudition only — nothing is copied, installed, or added to your system. That keeps a large archive auditionable without flooding every font menu on your Mac. Installing is a separate, explicit action for the ones you actually choose.

Yes. A font source can be a local folder, a folder on an external drive, or a share on a NAS or file server. Sources reconnect on their own when the drive is plugged back in or the share is mounted, and a font whose source is currently missing tells you which one it is waiting for rather than silently disappearing.

Mount it first in the Finder — Go › Connect to Server (⌘K) with an smb:// or afp:// address — so the share appears as a volume. Then in FontAudition open Font Sources and either drag the folder onto the list or use Add Font Source… and choose it. FontAudition scans it and its subfolders and the fonts appear in the grid, read where they sit.

Each source shows a status: Connected, Available (saved but not currently connected), Offline (the volume is not mounted) or Unavailable. Tick Auto Connect and a source reconnects itself whenever the volume comes back, so a laptop that leaves the studio picks the server up again on its own. Disconnect hides a source's fonts for now; Forget removes the saved source entirely. Neither touches a single file on the server.

If a source reports a permission error rather than connecting, granting FontAudition Full Disk Access in System Settings › Privacy & Security usually clears it. That is only needed for awkward locations, not as a matter of course.

Google Fonts is built in — around 1,900 free, open-source families, browsable and searchable inside the app. Click a family to preview it in FontAudition only; nothing is left behind if you close the window without installing. Install the ones you want and every weight is downloaded and made available across your Mac. A Free Font Sources panel points at six further reputable free libraries. For commercial work, always confirm a font's license fits the job.

Open it from the Free Fonts button in the toolbar and pick Google Fonts. The catalog ships inside the app, so browsing, searching and filtering by category — serif, sans serif, display, handwriting, monospace — all work with no internet connection. A line at the top keeps count of how many families are available, how many you have installed, and how much disk they are using.

Clicking a family downloads just enough to show it to you, registered inside FontAudition only. Look at fifty, close the window, and nothing is left behind — the previews are discarded. Only when you click the install arrow on a row does that family become permanent: every weight and style is downloaded and made available to every app on your Mac. You can select several rows and install them in one go, and there is a progress bar with a cancel button for larger batches.

Previewing and installing both need an internet connection; browsing the catalog does not.

The same Free Fonts panel lists six further sources of legitimately free type: Adobe Fonts (included with a Creative Cloud subscription), FontShare, Velvetyne, The League of Moveable Type, Collletttivo and Free Faces. Unlike Google Fonts these are not built in — clicking one opens its website in your browser.

Once you have downloaded fonts from any of them, add them with File › Install Font Files… or by dropping the files onto the FontAudition window, and they join the grid like anything else.

Fonts you installed through FontAudition, and Google families you downloaded in it, can be removed from inside the app with a confirmation first. System fonts and fonts belonging to a connected source are never deletable — they are not FontAudition's to remove. You can also hide any font or family from your grid without uninstalling it, which is useful for the hundreds of system faces you will never set type in.

Anything that accepts styled text, vector, image or plain text on the pasteboard — Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Figma, Sketch, Canva, Pages, Keynote, Word, Google Docs, TextEdit and Preview among them. What arrives is your sample text already set in the font you dragged, not a font name you then have to find in a menu.

No, and it does not need to. FontAudition offers several representations at once — vector PDF, a bitmap image, rich text, HTML, and plain text — and the receiving app takes the richest one it understands. Illustrator gets live vector artwork; Pages gets editable styled text; Figma gets marked up text with the family and size attached.

You do not choose — the receiving app takes the richest thing it understands. In practice that means:

• Illustrator, InDesign, Preview — vector PDF. Live artwork with the font's real metrics, so it keeps scaling cleanly.
• Photoshop — a TIFF image of the set text, for when a picture is what is wanted.
• Pages, Keynote, Word, TextEdit — rich text. The words arrive editable, already carrying the font and size.
• Figma, Sketch, Canva, Notion, Google Docs — HTML with the family and size attached inline.
• Final Cut Pro — an FCPXML Basic Title with your sample text already set.
• Anything else — plain text, so a drag never simply fails.

If a drop lands as unstyled text, the receiving app took the plain-text version because it did not understand the richer ones. Pasting into a different app, or using that app's own paste-special, usually gets you further.

A font dragged onto a Final Cut Pro timeline arrives as a Basic Title with your sample text already set in that family, face and size. That said, if Final Cut Pro is where your type work mostly happens, FontAudition WFE is the product built for it — it opens beside the timeline rather than in a separate app.

Yes, in two forms. A PDF font sheet is a printable contact sheet of a collection, each font named with its family, style and PostScript name, with a character specimen and your sample text set in it. A plain-text export gives just the names, for a spec document or an email. Both work on a named collection, so save your shortlist as one first.

A US Letter PDF laid out two cards to a row, paginated for as many fonts as the collection holds. The header carries the collection's name, how many fonts it contains and the sample text you used, with the date on the right.

Each card names the font, gives a Family · Style · PostScript line beneath it, then shows a character specimen — A–Z, a–z, digits and common symbols rendered in that face — and finally your own sample text, scaled to fit the card with the point size noted. Anything that cannot set your sample says so in the card rather than printing blank. Every card is numbered, and the footer carries the page count.

Choose File › Export Font Sheet as PDF…, pick a location, and the finished PDF opens by itself. It is meant to be sent to a client or printed and marked up. Both exports work on a saved collection, so if the menu items are greyed out, select a collection in the Display menu first.

Click any font and the Font Info panel names it precisely: family, style, PostScript name, file format, and whether it came from your system, a connected source, or Google Fonts. The PostScript name is the one design apps and CSS ask for.

Tell us which product you have — FontAudition Desktop, FontAudition WFE, or the bundle — along with your macOS version and, if the problem involves dragging type somewhere, which app you were dragging into. If it concerns a particular font, its name and where it came from helps.

Get in touch and we will help you work out which one fits how you actually work. Purchases and refunds are handled by Apple rather than by us, but we would rather help you land on the right product than leave you with the wrong one.

No. Fonts you connect as a source are read where they sit and are never copied or modified. Installing copies a font into place for your account and leaves your original file untouched. The only thing FontAudition deletes is a font you explicitly ask it to remove.