Most font managers are capable of collecting fonts any way you want, but unless it either refers to an included database or embedded information in the fonts themselves, you will have to make these categorizations manually, to your own specifications. This, depending on the number of fonts in your library, can be very labor intensive, but in the end more useful to you than any factory-supplied organization system.

Still it would be handy to have a guide to go by. The Typowiki might be a good place to start looking for one.

MikeD, since your Windows based may I suggest taking FontOrg for a spin?
Please post your comments if you do.

http://fontorg.com/default.aspx

I tried FontExpert for Windows, and it seems quite nice.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

I agree that categories are somewhat arbitrary, but I'm cool with that...50 arbitrary categories are much easier to deal with than 6000 individual fonts :)

I tried fontorg and while it is a cool little app, it doesn't do anything more than what I can do with FontDoctor, which I already have. If you don't have font doctor though, I recommend it.

I tried the typowiki last night before I posted, hoping that someone had already asked this question and found a solution...but alas, nothing.

I don't look forward to the hours and hours it is going to take me to sort all my fonts.

Even the ability to preview fonts in Explorer would be welcome, because i could bin them that way...the unfortunate thing about suitcase is that once the fonts are sorted into groups within that program, the list of fonts within each group cannot then be exported. If they could be, i could just write a little perl script to do the sorting into folders thing for me.

My search continues. Any Mac or Windows suggestions are welcome, as i have and use both.

...Mike

In case you don't run Vista, I'd recommend ATM, maybe it's still for sale somewhere. As far as I remember the free version won't let you make folders, but ATM deluxe does.