Today's Top Tip ... Lot's of fonts

[humblenations]

So you have thousands of fonts installed on you computer and want to find a font really quickly. It used to be simple with dropdown because you could type it. But this is useless now because it displays the actual font so it takes forever (I wish they had left this as system text!!) ... so you can't just type H-E-L-V to find that most-common-of-fonts. Also the 'font gallery' is really slow to scroll if you have thousands installed ...

So what I do is use the 'Font Gallery' and click on 'More...' and then 'Find ...' - this is the quickest way of getting to a named font fast.

It would nice if it as just a single click and it search up and down rather than having to select. Sort this out Xara. But this is the quickest way I've found.

[wizard509]

Does having that many fonts installed drag down your system speed? Just curious, because my system complains and notifies me when I get over a certain number of fonts installed.

[humblenations]

Does having that many fonts installed drag down your system speed? Just curious, because my system complains and notifies me when I get over a certain number of fonts installed.

It all comes down to memory and whether you run 64-bit or not. Like Windows 7 can only access up to 4 gig. Have about 2 gig of fonts and you might have some problems with a few apps open. Windows loads all fonts into memory. But the tip is more to do with scrolling through the font gallery and it taking ages to find the font and hit the perfect place in your list when you have a few thousand fonts install. It takes quite a while to get there. This tip is about getting to the right place fast if you know the name of the font. I have about 4-5k fonts installed and know the names of about half of them. I've been freelance designing for about 20 years so have bought quite a collection over time. I don't even want to think how much I've spent over the years on fonts, it makes me scared to contemplate!

[wizard509]

I have a 64-bit machine running windows 7 5gig ram. I don't know if this machine does it or not but with my previous machine most programs especially Microsoft would default to saving in my documents or my pictures and that would slow down the machine. So I make sure now that stuff is not saved in those two areas and I keep it clean as I can. Anyway I found out that removing stuff from those two places gave me a significant increase in speed particularly moving photos somewhere else, so that is what prompted the question about fonts. I am a little skittish about having too many fonts installed mostly because it just takes too long to find the font I think looks good.

[humblenations]

I am a little skittish about having too many fonts installed mostly because it just takes too long to find the font I think looks good.

That's sort of counter-intuitive to my mind. If you don't have them installed how can you test them out to see if they look good with the project you're working on? Also by having all your fonts installed they sort of start to go in subliminaly when you scroll through them. Or that's what I've found from the last 20 odd years of designing. I probably know a few thousand fonts by sight and name.

[wizard509]

I use amp font viewer and can temporarly install a font or not, also it lets me view not installed fonts, the catch is I just cannot view them in the document unless I install the font either permanently or temporarily This method works great for me but it may not for you. Another one I like is font explorer and I keep this one for the sole reason that it shows the entire character map and you can copy the selected character as a vector and paste it into Xara, it does paste it in very large however and needs to be reduced to a manageable size. These methods work for me but may not be for you. Anyhow that's how I get around one problem.

[amoore]

Different strokes, as they say. I can't stand doing a lot of scrolling. Plus, I've experienced system slow-downs and difficulty with some applications when there are too many fonts installed. Therefore, I keep active fonts to a minimum — just the ones Windows or particular applications demand and a few that I use frequently. Like wizard509, I use a font manager that allows me to quickly activate and deactivate fonts as needed. It enables me to see a preview of custom sample text in any installed font, active or not. And, when I do the work of tagging and categorizing my fonts, I can quickly filter to the type of fonts I need for a particular project.