Turn Photoshop's Font Preview On Or Off (Photoshop CS2 and Higher)

Turn Photoshop's Font Preview Off To Improve Performance

Many Photoshop users, especially designers, share the attitude that when it comes to fonts, you can never have too many installed on your computer. You won't get any arguments from me, but you may get one from Photoshop. Having too many fonts installed on your system can cause performance problems with Photoshop. In Photoshop CS2, Adobe introduced a new Font Preview feature which, as the name implies, allows you to see a preview of what each font looks like when choosing a font in the Options Bar:

One way to potentially improve Photoshop's performance is by turning this font preview off. To do that, go up to the Edit (Win) / Photoshop (Mac) menu at the top of the screen, choose Preferences, and then choose Type. There aren't many options in the Type section, but the one at the very bottom is Font Preview Size. You'll see a checkbox to the left of the option's name. Click inside the checkbox to enable or disable the font preview. With the checkbox visible, the font preview is enabled. With the checkbox not visible, the font preview is disabled:

You'll find that you can't access the Font Preview Size selection box to the right of the option's name while font preview is disabled, which of course doesn't really matter since you can't see the font previews at that point anyway.