Inventory Solution will gather font data from client machines running supported versions of the Mac OS X operating system.
Font Types
Inventory Solution will search for the following font types:
True Type Fonts:
PostScript Type 1
OpenType PostScript
Note: TTC fonts, which are collections of fonts, are not included. (1)
Scanned Directories
The following locations are searched for font files:
/Library/Fonts
/Network/Library/Fonts
/System/Library/Fonts
/System Folder/Fonts
~/Library/Fonts in all user home directories
Database Storage
Once inventory has completed, font data is stored in the following location in the Symantec_cmdb:
- Data class: Fonts
- Database table: Inv_Fonts
This data class contains only Mac font data. We do not collect font data for any other operating system platform. By extension, selecting the ‘Font’ data class in the advanced settings of an inventory task or policy only applies to mac clients.
A typical, default system will report between 180 and 300 fonts, or database rows, depending on the OS version.
1 True Type Collections – TTC Fonts
A ‘TTC’ is a file containing a collection of fonts saved in the TrueType format. It is used to deliver multiple fonts in a single file; useful for combining fonts that share many glyphs in common. It may contain a single font or it may contain multiple, related fonts. The ttc file name is not necessarily the name of the embedded fonts. (Source: Wikipedia. )
By default, Inventory Solution does not include TTC fonts. The font names are embedded within the TTC file. While it is possible to read the ttc file and gather this information, it can be fairly complex to do so. We have therefore architected the font gathering scripts to not include TTC files. We are re-evaluating this and may change in the future. For now, custom inventory is the only method for finding ttc font files whether that be the ttc file name or the embedded fonts.
Sample Custom Inventory
A sample custom inventory shell script is attached that will query system_profiler for font data.