Custom folder for fonts in Photoshop

Question

Me and my fellow co-workers are using PS and if one of us uses a font that the rest do not have you get those annoying warnings about not having that font... Is there a better way to share that font(s)? Like a shared folder that we could point PS to look for its fonts. This way all of us will be in sync.

Some of us are running Mac with PS5 and some Win7 with PS6.

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

I'm not sure you can do this directly with PS. PS will use the fonts installed in the system or the fonts installed in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts (on Windows).

One way to do this would be create a shared folder on your network and synchronize this shared folder with the ...Adobe\Fonts folder.

EDIT:

I was able to get this to work using Dropbox as suggested by @plainclothes. To get a painless, cross-platform solution, you might need some assistance from your system admin.

Here's what I did on my PC. I don't have a Mac to try this on but a similar approach should work

• Create an account on Dropbox and install the dropbox application on your PC.
• Within your local Dropbox (typically c:\Users\username\Dropbox) directory create a directory to hold your fonts.
• Next open a command window on your PC in administrator mode (Start->type 'cmd'->right click on 'Run as Administrator')
• create a symlink to the Dropbox/Fonts folder using mklink

On my PC I did this with the command below

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe>  mklink /D Fonts C:\Users\Dinesh\Dropbox\Fonts
symbolic link created for Fonts <<===>> C:\Users\Dinesh\Dropbox\Fonts

I was in the Adobe directory when I created the link but it should work regardless of where you are as long as you are in admin mode.

With the symlink created I'm able to access the fonts in my Dropbox folder using Photoshop. And it syncs both ways i.e. I can drop a font file into my local folder at it shows up on dropbox. You'll need to share the font folder on dropbox with the rest of your team or create an account specifically for this purpose that everyone has access to.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

In addition to the system fonts folder, adobe products also have a common shared folder for font files.

For many years, I have had Adobe software (multiple revisions) fail to find all the fonts installed on my (windows) computer. The solution to this was to add a shortcut to the windows system fonts inside the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts.

So while this fonts folder is for font files, Photoshop does actually follow shortcuts as well: you can try adding a shortcut to a shared font folder on a network drive.

I do not know the location of this folder under the Mac OS, but the solution may be similar and if there is no appropriate Mac variant of a shortcut, a symlink will do.

Answer 3

Have someone on your team set up an rsync script to keep things sync'd.

Otherwise, you can try aliasing a Dropbox folder into your fonts folder but I've never had any luck with that.

Another option is to keep your shared fonts in Dropbox and each member set up a font management app to look there.