One area of software for the PC that has taken a massive nose dive over the last 8 years or so is font management. Adobe used to have Adobe Type Manager, which hasn’t been updated in years. Extensis has two font management programs but they only seem to be updated and improved on the Macintosh side of things. Basically what PC users are left with is what Windows has built-in and while this does allow you to install and uninstall fonts it does little else.
So what is one supposed to do for font management on the PC? Well, you can create directories on your hard drive and organize your fonts that way, just installing and uninstalling the directories of fonts as you need them. This will of course work, but it is time consuming and sloppy. Or you can try one of the shareware font managers available. Something like High-Logic's MainType 1.1 which I like a lot.
Besides being able to view fonts and their specifics, you can group them and you can install, load, uninstall and unload fonts. What is the difference between installing and loading? Well an installed font is both added to the system font table and to the font related part of the registry. All fonts in the system font table are available to all applications. Due to the entry in the registry an installed font is always available even after a reboot. A loaded font is added to the system font table, but not to the font related part of the registry. Because all fonts in the system font table are available to all applications, loaded fonts (just like installed fonts) are available to all applications. However loaded fonts are no longer available after the system is rebooted.
So basically an installed font is available to all applications even after a reboot (like installing fonts using the Control Panel font applet) and a loaded font is only available to all applications until you reboot at which time it won’t be available until you either reinstall or reload it/them.
This makes it very easy to create groups of fonts that are application specific or even project specific and by loading them you don’t have to worry about them messing up your system after the next time you reboot. After all you can only have so many fonts installed in to Windows before you start seeing a performance hit. Generally I recommend keeping installed fonts to fewer than 300. So you can install a nice selection of fonts you want available all of the time and then use MainType’s grouping and loading functions to add others as you need them knowing that when you reboot you won’t have to worry about them until you need them again.
As I said before the grouping and installing and loading of fonts is not all that MainType does. It also allows you to view fonts, their character sets and the font’s features. You can also print out sample sheets so that when you are looking for a font you can turn to a printed guide (for those that don’t like doing this on the computer). But, MainType also lets you filter the fonts. Assuming they are setup correctly (professional fonts are more likely to have the attributes set correctly than free or shareware fonts, so this may not always work for all fonts) so that you can view serif, san-serif, symbol, etc. type fonts. This makes finding the fonts you want quick and easy. This is also something you can’t do with a printed guide.
MainType is the font manager that should have been built into Windows long ago. Since other companies don’t seem to be willing to pick up the slack from Microsoft all I can say is thank god High-Logic has. Main Type is easy to use, it has a nice clean interface and it is affordably priced. I can’t recommend it enough.
