Thank you so much for the clarification, and the fix in the first place. So the Ai team didn’t offer any clarification and the fix is a patch, rather than a two-sided solution... sad to hear this. Let’s hope it would stay stable at least.

Adobe Illustrator v30.3 and later doesn't support native macOS auto activation anymore, as it doesn't send any font requests. The Illustrator team reached out to ask for more information and potential solutions, but unfortunately they didn't reply to clarify whether this is now expected behaviour or whether reverting to previous behaviour is being considered.

Since that is still unclear, Typeface app now actively checks for missing fonts in order to auto activate them when opening documents.

Support for macOS Document-support fonts seems to remain unavailable due to the Illustrator changes. These fonts cannot be provided by font managers.

The font activation issue has been fixed with the new Typeface 4.3.1 update, released on May 19!

This is definitely a major issue for our department and workflow.
Hopefully this isn't another instance of Adobe trying to force Adobe Fonts on users.

Leigh, I’m told the engineering team is investigating this is planning to reach the Typeface team to discuss it further. Fingers crossed!

Hi! Any updates? It would be great if an engineer would reach out to the Typeface team to get this resolved.

It appears that 30.3 only loads fonts that are 'available'. On macOS fonts can be provided on demand by other apps.

Previously when a document was opened all used fonts in that document were loaded by Illustrator. This allowed other apps to provide fonts that were not already available, in order to display them in the document. So missing fonts were provided and displayed correctly.

In 30.3 that doesn't happen: missing fonts are not 'loaded', therefore they cannot be provided by other apps. I suspect there is some new check such as 'if font is available then load font'.

This may also affect 'Document-support fonts'. These are macOS system fonts that do not appear 'available' for new documents (users cannot select them). However if an existing document tries to load such a font the system automatically provides it for that document. So existing documents will render the font correctly, because the missing font is loaded and automatically provided by the system.

If someone on the Adobe team wants more info please feel free to reach out.

In 2026 (30.3), macOS “Document-support fonts” are no longer automatically recognized. This may share the same root cause.

My local font library is managed by Typeface. In all prior versions of Illustrator, any font not active when the document is opened would automatically activate with the correct fonts for that document.

With 30.3, the document opens with fonts that must be manually activated. The notes for Mac say that it introduced "improved font handling in Illustrator (macOS) for better consistency and reduced reliance on unsupported system resources". This new font handling apparently breaks Typeface’s auto font activation for Illustrator.

It would be great if this could be fixed so that Typeface can auto activate fonts again.

I did reach out to the team at Typeface, and they are still investigating on their end but it doesn't seem clear as to what Adobe changed to make it nonfunctional.

It’d require both of them, Adobe and the Typeface team working together, I believe... let’s start with the 'have broken' — how? What goes wrong and how exactly?
The Ai team would need all the information you can provide to start investigating. I’d advise writing the other team too, to make them aware.