Is there a simple way (and universal – i.e., with Apple apps only) to get a list of fonts installed on a machine?
Hi Adam,
two suggestions:
tell application "Font Book" to get name of typefaces
or the shell equivalent
do shell script "system_profiler SPFontsDataType | grep 'Full Name' | cut -d ':' -f 2 | cut -c 2-50"
Thank you Stefan – getting paragraphs of the shell version produces a nice list too. 
And this does what I want:
tell application "Font Book" to set myFonts to my removeDupNames(name of typefaces)
on removeDupNames(L)
set tList to {}
repeat with I in L
set I to word 1 of I
if tList does not contain I then set end of tList to (contents of I)
end repeat
return tList
end removeDupNames
Better yet:
tell application "Font Book" to set myFonts to my removeDupNames(name of typefaces)
set newLine to ASCII character 10
tell (a reference to my text item delimiters)
set {old_atid, contents} to {contents, newLine}
set {myFonts, contents} to {myFonts as Unicode text, old_atid}
end tell
set myFonts to (do shell script "echo " & quoted form of myFonts & " | sort")'s paragraphs
on removeDupNames(L)
set tList to {}
repeat with I in L
set I to word 1 of I
if tList does not contain I then set end of tList to (contents of I)
end repeat
return tList
end removeDupNames
And this is where I was going: the user gets to enter a font name and this script checks to see if it’s there (without attributes like bold or italic):
– Thanks for the kick start to get over my senior moment :lol:
tell application "Font Book" to set myFonts to my removeDupNames(name of typefaces)
set newLine to ASCII character 10
tell (a reference to my text item delimiters)
set {old_atid, contents} to {contents, newLine}
set {myFonts, contents} to {myFonts as Unicode text, old_atid}
end tell
set myFonts to (do shell script "echo " & quoted form of myFonts & " | sort")'s paragraphs
set aFont to "Hlvetica"
aFont is in myFonts --> false
on removeDupNames(L)
set tList to {}
repeat with I in L
set I to word 1 of I
if tList does not contain I then set end of tList to (contents of I)
end repeat
return tList
end removeDupNames
You’re welcome 