Font Organization Help

[yanno88]

Hey guys, Ive been looking for a way to organize my fonts on my mac & have a few questions.

1. How can I search based on the Font Type (sans-serif, serif etc...)

2. How can I organize them to know who created them just in case I want to use for commercial use? (& I want to give credit or pay)

3. How do you clean out old fonts you dont use anymore.

Im sure there is a program or something, just want to get some opinions here.

thanks a bunch

[wizard509]

Welcome to TG yanno88, I don't know the answer to your question especially using a mac. From my experience though you need to create the categories manually with a font manager and place the font in that category. I could be all wet though, when I tried it some time ago that's how it worked. Right now I have removed all but the windows necessary fonts and only installing new fonts as I need at them.

[yanno88]

yea I was hoping you had another answer lol but thank you

thats the way im doing it now, but it is very tedious.

thank you kindly sir

[Gare]

Hi Yanno—

You asked a Macintosh-specific question on a predominantly Windows forum...but, hey, you already got two members willing to try to help you, eh? :)

I'd do a search online, using the keywords "Font Management", and "Font Management utils", or "Macintosh Font Management utils", although what you ask for probably doesn't exist. Try Smith Micro, too; they own Poser these days, but also a lot of Macintosh utilities.

Okay, given I don't have specific answers for you, your questions are good ones, so I'd like to address them "neutrally", and in certain instances for Windows users...

1. Q:How can I search based on the Font Type (sans-serif, serif etc...)? I don't know of a font organizer program that can auto-detect that a typeface is Roman, Gothic, serif, or so on. This is a human judgement, seeing as fonts are created by humans. I believe you'd have to manually organize your collection of typefaces and then use a program such as >>>Nexus Font<<<. It does an awful lot of stuff one would otherwise need to do manually and it's donationware.

2. Q: How can I organize them to know who created them? Again, there's no automated way I know of to glean the creator of a specific font, or a group. You can tell who created the typeface and any restrictions by right-clicking the font icon, choose Properties and then Details. This is assuming that the font creator actually coded their personal data into their work. Some do, some don't. I'd say there's a 50/50 chance if there is no font information in a typeface, it's been hacked, the real owner's info has been deleted, and it's a commercial typeface posted illegally on the web.



3. Q: How do you clean out old fonts you don't use anymore? Be careful about actually deleting typefaces off your hard drive(s). Font styles go in and out of fashion, and I could kick myself for having deleting the Souvenir font family ten years ago. To move the fonts to a folder (using Windows 7, although on the Mac the steps are similar) so they don't show on your available list of typefaces in Xara and other programs, you click the Windows button on the Taskbar, choose control Panel, then Fonts. You see a font you don't want loaded any more, you drag its icon to your "For Safe Keepings" folder (you'll want to create)—this copies it. Then you click on the icon in the Fonts folder (in Control Panel), and then hit Delete key on your keyboard. Answer "Yes" to the confirmation box and it's gone.





Once in a while, you might have a program open that's either using this font or has read it into system memory and you'll find you can't delete it until you restart Windows or close the program.

Good enough?

My Best,

Gary

[mwenz]

Most Mac people I know use FontExplorer:
http://www.fontexplorerx.com/pro/

Take care, Mike