this should be automatic for local use. however if you are sharing with a team somewhere else, for example another designer who is also working on the same file on their computer somewhere else, they will need to have that font installed on their local computer.

Yeah. I don’t work within a team. It’s just for me on my local machine. I guess it’s a very particular use.

so you want it to use fonts in a folder that is not installed on your machine?

I want to use a fonts folder on my machine.

is there any other graphcs program that has this capability? other than a font management app

Yes. If I export my fonts directly into the Adobe fonts folder the illustrator files get the update while opened. It’s just that Illustrator got so slow..

hmmmm. never did font management this way before. since font book came out i used font book. before that i used font explorer x but it stopped working :(((

I’ve used a few font managers and all require a Figma restart so not sure this is possible.

For Adobe Illustrator I can just export my fonts directly inside the Adobe fonts folder and the fonts get updated in real time with the software opened. It’s just that illustrator is really slow. I’d prefer to use a more lighter software to design my specimens.

So is this for active fonts in development? I tend to use InDesign for specimens. It’s faster than AI for me.

I'm not sure I follow, Figma can see any font you have installed locally, and you can install fonts directly into your team if you're on an Org+ plan. Open files will need a refresh to see newly installed fonts.

Through FontBook which won’t update the fonts automatically while I’m working on them and constantly upgrading them with features I need to test out. With FontBook I need to uninstall then reinstall. It’s too much work.

Ah I see what you mean - yes that’s a bummer shortcoming with how Figma handles fonts right now. I’d suggest it on forum.figma.com/c/share/12 , I’ll vote it up!

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figma should be able to pick up your fonts that are installed locally on computer. or do you mean something else?

Yep! I feel this pain. Adding new fonts requires a Figma restart every time. Very tedious when testing many fonts for brand/logo exploration. When designing my own typeface in Glyphs, I export directly to the system fonts folder but still have to restart Figma for every update.