Any Font Lovers in the House?!

[theKeeper]

Check THIS out!
What a find!

http://www.bitstorm.org/fontlist/

[Welles]

Haw...as a Windows newbie, one of the first things I looked for was a font viewer. That one looks good, Mark. I also came up with Free$Easy Font Viewer...

http://www.styopkin.com/details_free...ts_viewer.html

...and for a free font manager I found Font Frenzy

http://www.fontfrenzy.org/

{Warning: Font Frenzy is produced by a religious org so if you're put off by that... its good though}

Font Frenzy isn't a professional grade font manager but I'm not gonna load up my Windows computer with the 11,000+ fonts which are on my Mac. ;)

[theKeeper]

11,000 huh? [stuned]

[Welles]

11,000 huh? [stuned]

Yep, but to be honest about 4,000-5,000 are huge families or subtle variations which I'll never use. I just went through a fontaholic phase where I purchased some great libraries cheap and licensed maybe 100 collections from small foundries and individuals, not to mention scouring the internet for freebies. I'll run them through TransType by FontLab if there is any question of the font quality. FontAgent Pro has very restrictive font diagnostic routines and won't import any font which is slightly problematic.

[theKeeper]

Very cool. %}

[Tanya]

Thanks, Mark

I downloaded this, although I wasn't sure what it would really do. Turns out it's a WYSIWYG of all your fonts using your Browser.. right?

Tanya

[mflintjer]

hey, when you have that many fonts, don't you have trouble starting up PS? At one time I had over 2,000 fonts in my fonts folder and it always took forever for PS to load up, is there a trick to having that many fonts on the system but keep prog load up times to a minimum? \:]

[Welles]

Hey mflintjer,

First off I'm using a Mac and haven't learned the difference between Mac and Windows font management. On the Mac I'm using FontAgent Pro which collects all my fonts into one location (except for some vital system fonts) and allows me to organize them into libraries and sets. Between the two, I can access fonts by foundry or a personalized descriptive classes.

I have a start up set of about 150 of my favorite, most often used fonts, in addition to the system fonts which load when my system boots. I then open FAP, choose and activate whichever fonts I wish to use for a project and they are deactivated the next time the computer is shut off. There are strict diagnostic routines as well so each time a font is activated it is checked for integrity.

The net result of using a throroughly professional font manager is that I never am loading more than 300 fonts at once. There are no corrupt font issues. I can organize and survey any number of fonts rapidly, like a movie, for making aesthetic decisions about which font to use, many Adobe applications have a plugin which will auto-activate fonts used in their documents when they are opened and the fonts aren't currently activated and there are many other lesser features.

Frankly, once your font collection exceeds 1000 fonts you need a font manager. Actually, over 500 and it doesn't hurt to think about it.