Do you love fonts? Do you have hundreds or even thousands of them loaded on your computer? I have 753. From what I hear, this is only a fraction of what some of you have. Did you know that having a lot of activated fonts takes up a considerable amount of system resources and can slow down your computer? Many activated fonts also cause problems for Photoshop. Photoshop may take a long time to load and will likely slow to a crawl and sometimes crash when you’re working with text. If you’re a font hoarder, a font manager is a must. A font manager allows you to activate and deactivate your fonts without physically removing them from your computer thus freeing up system resources. It also allows you to preview and compare fonts, detect corrupt fonts and organize your fonts into collections.
There are many font manager programs available. The good news is that there are a lot of very good free Windows based font managers out there. Personally I have used the Font Thing and the AMP Font Viewer. I liked the Font Thing but it did not support Open Type fonts so I switched to the AMP Font Viewer. The AMP Font Viewer supports TrueType, OpenType, and Type 1 fonts. It is an easy to use font manager which allows you to get a quick preview of both installed and non installed fonts. It can temporarily install and uninstall fonts and allows you to organize them in collections. I organized my fonts into the following collections: Calligraphy, Newspaper, Handwriting, Neat printing, Kid Fonts, Fancy Printing, Messy, Typewriter and Good Title fonts. This organization makes it really easy for me to find the perfect font for a scrapbook layout. The one thing I do not like about AMP Font Viewer is that you have to click and move each font into a collection individually. There is no drag and drop capability.
As a word of caution, make sure you don’t mess around with your system fonts when you organize your fonts. If you uninstall some of your system fonts, other programs within your operating system may not work properly. You can easily find your system fonts HERE for PCs (just choose your operating system from the Product Drop Down menu). HERE is the most recent Mac listing of fonts that I could find. I don’t think the Mac allows you to disable system fonts. That’s always a good thing.
I haven’t looked at PC font managers for quite some time. When looking at font managers for this post, I came across this recent review of several free font managers. They gave their best review to NexusFont available here. Since all the listed programs are free, you might as well try a couple out and see which one suits your needs the best. Unfortunately there were no Mac font managers listed. It seems that Mac users have relatively few free font managers available. This could very well be because Macs come prepackaged with font management software called Font Book. I’ve only had my iMac for a week so I cannot give a very good review of Font Book but one thing I did notice is that you cannot preview more than one font at a time. That is kind of a bummer as I like to compare several at once. Popular Mac font managers appear to be Suitcase Fusion 3 and FontAgent Pro, which both sell for approximately $100. Font Safari is a cheaper option and has good reviews from Cnet. It is $15 to buy. Another Mac font manager that sells in the Apple App store is FontCase. It sells for $29.99 but has mixed reviews and doesn’t appear to be Lion compatible yet.
We have had some big discussions regarding font management both on FB and in our forum HERE. Come join and share your thoughts and advice.
Tiki
Kathleen O'Neill says
This was a great article, and something I sorely needed. I love fonts, and just sitting home one afternoon clicking on a link to Da Font, I realize I must have downloaded over a hundred–and I probably have hundreds of others that I’ve collected. They’re not all on this particular computer I’m using, because it’s relatively new, but I keep wanting to install them, as there are a number of them I miss using. I’m glad to know about alternatives, that would allow me to have them without leaving them on my machine permanently.
jollibee says
BeeFont is very good alternative to Fontcase. It is the ultimate font utility for users who require a quick, easy and comprehensive overview of all their fonts on Mac.