How can I find the full path to a font from its display name on a Mac?

open up a terminal (Applications->Utilities->Terminal) and type this in:

locate InsertFontHere

This will spit out every file that has the name you want.

Warning: there may be alot to wade through.

I haven’t been able to find anything that does this directly. I think you’ll have to iterate through the various font folders on the system: /System/Library/Fonts, /Library/Fonts, and there can probably be a user-level directory as well ~/Library/Fonts.

There must be a method in Cocoa to get a list of fonts, then you would have to use the PyObjC bindings to call it..

Depending on what you need them for, you could probably just use something like the following..

import os
def get_font_list():
    fonts = []
    for font_path in ["/Library/Fonts", os.path.expanduser("~/Library/Fonts")]:
        if os.path.isdir(font_path):
            fonts.extend(
                [os.path.join(font_path, cur_font) 
                 for cur_font in os.listdir(font_path)
                ]
            )
    return fonts

With matplotlib (pip3 install -U matplotlib):

from matplotlib import font_manager

fontmap = {font.name: font for font in font_manager.fontManager.ttflist}
fontmap.update({font.name: font for font in font_manager.fontManager.afmlist})

print(f'Total fonts: {len(fontmap.keys())}')

for family in sorted(fontmap.keys()):
    font = fontmap[family]
    print(f'{family:<30}: {font.fname}')

Sample output

Total fonts: 312
.Aqua Kana                    : /System/Library/Fonts/AquaKana.ttc
Academy Engraved LET          : /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/Academy Engraved LET Fonts.ttf
Al Bayan                      : /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/AlBayan.ttc
American Typewriter           : /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/AmericanTypewriter.ttc
...
Zapf Dingbats                 : /System/Library/Fonts/ZapfDingbats.ttf
ZapfDingbats                  : /usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/matplotlib/mpl-data/fonts/pdfcorefonts/ZapfDingbats.afm
Zapfino                       : /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/Zapfino.ttf

NOTE: The font families from matplotlib do not seem to include all system fonts that are available for example to the PyQt5 library:

from PyQt5.QtGui import QFontDatabase
from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QApplication

app = QApplication([])
print('n'.join(QFontDatabase().families()))

I had encountered similar requirements and I ended up by this method:

def get_font_path(font):
    ttf_filename = os.path.basename(font)
    dirs = []
    if sys.platform == "win32":
        # check the windows font repository
        # NOTE: must use uppercase WINDIR, to work around bugs in
        # 1.5.2's os.environ.get()
        windir = os.environ.get("WINDIR")
        if windir:
            dirs.append(os.path.join(windir, "fonts"))
    elif sys.platform in ("linux", "linux2"):
        lindirs = os.environ.get("XDG_DATA_DIRS", "")
        if not lindirs:
            # According to the freedesktop spec, XDG_DATA_DIRS should
            # default to /usr/share
            lindirs = "/usr/share"
        dirs += [
            os.path.join(lindir, "fonts") for lindir in lindirs.split(":")
        ]
    elif sys.platform == "darwin":
        dirs += [
            "/Library/Fonts",
            "/System/Library/Fonts",
            os.path.expanduser("~/Library/Fonts"),
        ]

    ext = os.path.splitext(ttf_filename)[1]
    first_font_with_a_different_extension = None
    for directory in dirs:
        for walkroot, walkdir, walkfilenames in os.walk(directory):
            for walkfilename in walkfilenames:
                if ext and walkfilename == ttf_filename:
                    return os.path.join(walkroot, walkfilename)
                elif (
                    not ext
                    and os.path.splitext(walkfilename)[0] == ttf_filename
                ):
                    fontpath = os.path.join(walkroot, walkfilename)
                    if os.path.splitext(fontpath)[1] == ".ttf":
                        return fontpath
                    if (
                        not ext
                        and first_font_with_a_different_extension is None
                    ):
                        first_font_with_a_different_extension = fontpath
    if first_font_with_a_different_extension:
        return first_font_with_a_different_extension

Note that the original code is from PIL