Managing My Fonts

• by GeekMan • In Reviews •   2

I have a lot of fonts.

Thousands and thousands of them, in fact. And keeping tabs on all those fonts is hard enough under regular conditions, but when it’s three in the morning and you’re under a deadline and need to find that font you used three jobs ago but can’t remember the name of, font management becomes CRITICAL. Which is why every designer needs a good font management program to help keep those unruly fonts in line.

Which brings me to my favorite font manager program ever; MainType.

I’ve tried a lot of font managers over the years, but I’ve yet to find one that works as well as MainType. From the (slightly) customizable interface, to the font rendering, to the ability to group fonts together in any way you want, MainType does everything I need a font manager to do. Of course, there are a few features I’d love to see added or improved upon, like having MainType work with PFM fonts and faster font preview rendering. But overall, this is one heck of a good program for designers, artists or anyone who has a lot of fonts to contend with on a daily basis. On a completely arbitrary scale of 1 to 10, MainType gets 8 Happy Geeks.

And really, how can you resist 8 Happy Geeks?

2 Comments

  1. Im currently using Suitcase.

    The best feature? It automatically looks for and loads (not installs.. big difference) fonts that you are missing on the fly. That font from 3 jobs ago? No problem.. It loads for you.. and stays loaded for as long as you want (until you close the doc, the program or the computer).

    That saves me loads of time. Especially when a client doesnt convert his fonts to outlines.

    The bad?
    It doesn’t scan for new fonts in your directories. You have to drag & drop new fonts into a set every time.

    Bad handling of duplicate fonts. It should know that if I have a font of similar filesize, name and other attributes it should simply ignore the extras.. Instead I get “blank” previews.

    Bad font searching. In fact.. NO font searching. No serf, sanserif, handwritten or any other attribute you want to label & sort by. Heck, you cant even type in a font name in a dialog box to search for it.

    I’m giving Maintype a try.. but it seems to have all the same features. Without the on-the-fly activation. Which, to me, is Suitcase’s grand feature.

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