What is Apple Font Tool Suite?
The Apple Font Tool Suite is a collection of applications included with macOS for editing, validating, and previewing fonts. It contains the following tools:
- Font Book - Manages installed fonts, previews fonts, installs/uninstalls fonts
- FontValidator - Validates font files and checks for potential issues
- Font Asset Studio - Extracts characters from font files to generate color font assets
- AATAnalyzer - Inspects Apple Advanced Typography (AAT) font data tables
- sfntTool - Views and edits font resource fork resource data
These GUI tools provide user-friendly ways for graphic designers, font developers, and other creative professionals to manage, debug and modify fonts on the macOS platform. Key features include previewing how fonts will look at different sizes, validating fonts to check them for potential rendering issues, generating font assets like color glyphs, and directly editing fonts at the resource fork level. The tools integrate tightly with macOS's font management system.
While targeted primarily at font development workflows rather than end users, the Apple Font Tool Suite gives macOS an advanced first-party set of font tools accessible even for less technical users. Together with macOS's robust font rendering, it provides creators a capable typography-focused development environment on Apple desktop platforms.