Confessions of a font junkie

December 14, 2005 7:39 AM

I humbly request help organizing my excessive horde of fonts.

At the moment I've got more than 2300 fonts installed on my PC. The hard drive to my old PC (inside my current computer) has an additional 2500 fonts in limbo, not installed at the moment. Believe it or not, there's not a huge number of duplicates between the hard drives' font sets. You can understand my dilemna, then.

I like a great number of these fonts, but obviously many of them are crap and/or will never be used by me, and trying to find suitable fonts for projects is huge chore. Most of the fonts on my current hard drive are professional quality. The ones on my secondary hard drive are, for the most part, intarweb freebies. Tossing them all together and trying to weed them out would let slip my frail grasp on sanity.

Anyway. Can anyone recommend a freeware (or modestly priced) font explorer/manager/organizer that could help me cull my fonts without requiring a concerted week-long effort on my part? I've used a few before on my old computer, but they've never been effective for my particular problem. Maybe something that displays previews of multiple fonts at once?

Are there any other methods I could undertake to help me cut down my number of nonessential fonts? I can't be the only misguided font junkie out there. Thanks for any help that you can offer.

posted by kryptondog to computers & internet (10 comments total)

You have 2300 faces installed? How in the hell do you run any programs? Something like Illustrator would take hours just to load.

Are these all TrueType or do you have PostScript fonts as well?
posted by Optimus Chyme at 7:43 AM on December 14, 2005

Very few PostScript fonts, but the vast majority of the fonts installed at the moment are Adobe's OpenType fonts. Oddly enough, I've yet to experience any significant lag when I'm running design programs. But then again, I'm running a new PC with a gig of ram, so.
posted by kryptondog at 7:47 AM on December 14, 2005

I like the fontBROWSER, myself.
posted by Gator at 7:54 AM on December 14, 2005

Jeez Louise, a piffling 5000? Of which many are duplicates? Um. I agree that keeping 2500 installed can be unfortunate, but that doesn't stop me from doing it. ("Well...I need the good serifs folder installed because I'm supposed to write that essay tonight...oh and these classy scripts in case I get around to doing that graphic...") If you aren't having problems or noticing the slowdown, don't worry.

Adobe Type Manager is of course a classic, and handy for lots of stuff. If you don't have it, you oughtta.

What you're asking for is tough. People have been looking for a solution for a long time, and lots of the current programs that purport to fix it are, to put it politely, crap. I have had problems with some of them (even popular stuff like TheFontThing) "disappearing" my fonts, so make sure you have everything backed up separately, preferably on removable media.

The first thing you need to do to sort everything is to find out which are duplicates. Say you have two versions of BrushScript. One file is brush_script.ttf and one is brushscr.ttf, but both are named BrushScript. Run FontRenamer and both files will be renamed to brushscript.ttf. This generates a conflict you'll be told about, so you can pick which version you'd rather keep.

Tougher is the stuff that only you can see is duplicated. Say you have Adobe Garamond plus Baramond (a popular clone; I don't know its legality). FontRenamer isn't going to catch it, because the fonts have different names. Only you can do it, and only by looking through and comparing all your fonts. There are zillions of tools that do this -- just open two fonts in one window so you can compare -- so Google for something like "view my fonts" until you find something that seems good. (I remember there's one that's done online, I think through Java? It was very cool, but I can't find it again. On preview, Gator for the win!) Hopefully you have a good memory as you're working through all your fonts.

You can hope to do some of this through PANOSE data. PANOSE data should also help with very-differently-named versions of popular fonts -- say, one version's named VinerHandITC and one's named MyHandwriting, and they have no info in common, but you can see all their characters are the same. Unfortunately not all fonts (or even formats, I think) include this data, and not everything reads it, and it's just a bitch to work with in general. One person on a Usenet group I've seen is working on a tool that should help with this. I'm not sure how truly helpful it will be, but it sounds good, and he says it'll be available before the new year. My contact info is in my profile.
posted by booksandlibretti at 8:38 AM on December 14, 2005 [1 favorite]

Linotype has a WONDERFUL free new app that (imho) completely outperforms Suitcase, Font Agent Pro and suitcase - Font Explorer Pro.

Typographica has a good review of the software and a link to download it here.
posted by luriete at 9:06 AM on December 14, 2005

luriete, that's for OS X, yeah? This guy's on a PC.
posted by booksandlibretti at 9:32 AM on December 14, 2005

Gator: Thanks for the link to Fontbrowser. I have a similar program on my PC, but it's dinky compared to FB (suprising, since it's a flash program). I can definitely make use of that.

luriete: booksandlibretti is right about me being a PC user, but I noticed an older Windows version for download on Linotype's site. I might give that a shot. Thanks!

booksandlibretti: Thank you very much for your detailed reply. It's as good a start as I could hope for, I imagine. As soon as I get off of work I'll get cracking. Would you mind if I inquired about that PANOSE utility via e-mail at some point down the line?
posted by kryptondog at 9:56 AM on December 14, 2005

Absolutely do contact me, kryptondog! That's why I mentioned my info. You may also want to check out the group for yourself.
posted by booksandlibretti at 10:00 AM on December 14, 2005

I think Linotype will be releasing a newer PC version sometime in the future (or so I heard), so it might be worth bookmarking their site and checking back every once in a while.
posted by djgh at 10:11 AM on December 14, 2005

Late to this, I know but I use this old but solid app to go through mine (don't even ask how many).
posted by Bdave at 7:13 AM on December 22, 2005