Typophile

Manage fonts

Thomas of Denmark

Over the years my font collection have seamed to grow quite large. This is good....(I guess). But since I cannot remember what they all look like, it is becomming a problem for me to choose the appropiate one for a given job (since there are so many).
All my fonts (not the ones the came with windows XP) recides in "/program files/common files/adobe/fonts". This means whenever I open a design program, eg. Illustrator, the font list is very large and there are no subdirectories for each font.
I am simply loosing track of my fonts....
A solution would be to catogorize the fonts, I think.
What do you guys do to prevent this problem?
Is there an international type classification that all the pros use?

/Thomas

Nick Shinn

>This is good....(I guess). But since I cannot remember what they all look like...

...then perhaps it's not so good after all.

And perhaps Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft should stop cluttering up people's font menus with gobs of fonts they don't need and didn't ask for. "Font Spam", as Gerald so aptly termed it.

One thing I've done is simply to empty out the file Library>Application Support>Adobe>Fonts (or XP equivalent). That helps quite a lot.

Tiffany Wardle

If you used a font management to activate and deactivate your fonts this wouldn't be a problem. I actually keep my fonts organized by foundry. I also find that after you load the fonts and quickly dig through them it is easy enough to remove the ones which really probably won't ever serve any sort of purpose. I also use FontBook to make PDFs of the various folders which I know I won't use that often.

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