HELP!! I need a font guru!
JasmineSkunk
Posts: 1,902
I recently have become a little enamoured with fonts and typography... and like many people, this fascination began with (you guessed it) collecting a bunch of free fonts...
Now... this collection grew and grew to enormous proportions and I have since learned a little more about typography and realised that I have many useless and ugly fonts on my system, so I went in search of a solution. I learned a bit about font managers and downloaded a free program called Nexus Font, which seems pretty straight forward and easy to understand... so far, so good.
I began by making a copy of my Windows/Fonts folder and placing it somewhere safe.
But here is where my confusion started....
The copy of my Windows/Fonts folder looks NOTHING like my actual Windows/ Fonts folder.
There are many many fonts in my copied folder that do not even show up in my Windows/Fonts folder. Most of these have a red "A" icon associated with them and (I think) they are system fonts or something . Anyway... some of these fonts are listed SEVERAL times in that copied folder I created, and some seem to be "greyed out" as if they are there but not installed. These fonts are not visible to me in my Windows/Fonts folder, only the copied folder. Also, some of my fonts seem to have entirely different names, even though I just simply copied the entire folder. I'm very confused by this and am not sure how to proceed. I am currently using Windows Vista.
Can anyone help? I'm so very very confused...
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Comments
Your Windows\Fonts folder actually shows you font collections. When you copied your fonts folder to a non-system directory, it shows you the individual fonts rather than the collections. That's why your copy looks like it has so much more fonts than normal.
For instance, go to your Windows\Fonts folder and find Arial. Right click it > Preview. You'll get 9 Windows Font Viewer windows because the Arial collection contains 9 variations of the font.
You'll also have some hidden due to the system language. On the left sidebar of your main Fonts folder, you should see a link for Font Settings. In there you can enable/disable hiding fonts based by language.
I've never used Vista, and the above is based on 7, but the idea should still apply.
Btw, nice to see you around here. Haven't seen you in a while.
/edit
I answered you on Rendo's forums as well, but that one included a bit that wasn't included above.
*.fon files are bitmap fonts, *.ttf files are truetype fonts, and *.otf files are open type fonts.
Thank you so much, Vaskania! I can't even say how much I appreciate the response! :) It's REALLY hard to find useful information about font management. It took me forever to figure out the simplest things! ha! And the font names vs. file names thing is VERY confusing! lol Why would they do that to people?? It just seems like it make things so confusing! There must be a better way... lol
...but anyway, thank you again for helping me understand, because I like to understand! :) *waves* ...and it's nice to see you, too! :coolsmile:
I don't know how Nexus Font works, but I've used AMP Font Viewer for years, and one of the features is that it tells you what the sub-families of the font are and the file name.
For instance, when I click on Arial, it says:
Available subfamilies-
Bold | Arial Bold -> arialbd.ttf
Bold Italic | Arial Bold Italic -> arialbi.ttf
Italic | Arial Italic -> ariali.ttf
Regular | Arial -> arial.ttf
Here's a link to the AMP viewer if you'd like to try it out. http://www.ampsoft.net/utilities/FontViewer.php
If a commercial application is an option you may try "MainType 5.1" from High-Logic.
Another is Printer's Apprentice:
http://www.loseyourmind.com/
...apologies, working late and misread this as "I need a a Font Gun".
...been messing with shaders waaaay too much lately my eyes are going blurry.
Years ago I used Adobe's Type Manager, but they discontinued sale and development of it, so I now use The Font Thing -->
http://the-font-thing.en.softonic.com/
is that a water pistol held by the Preacher for the baby's head? :lol:
I don't know anything about how fonts work on Windows, but I've been using Extensis's Suitcase since 1990. That's creakingly old, but it's been rebuilt a couple of times since then (it started out as a program in the Apple menu back in the days before multifinder was the standard -- and when you could only have something like 30 fonts installed in the system), and the developers are still keeping it up to date and maintaining it. I'm pretty sure it's a cross-platform product.
It's a background app which allows you to turn your fonts on and off as you want them (rather than installing and deinstalling them), so you aren't tripping over *all* of them in your font menu all the time. Extensis has a couple of other Font managers, I think, and there are other companies with other ones out there. But if you really do have an extensive collection then you really do need some kind of a font manager. It's way too much hassle to try to manage a large collection of fonts through whatever kind of font managment comes with your OS.
is that a water pistol held by the Preacher for the baby's head? :lol:
...for those drive by baptisms ;-)
no no it's "Fond Gun"
fond / caramelized drippings from meat juices, used to make gravy
...back on the topic. Would this probably help? The offer is only good through tomorrow.
FontPack Pro at Smith Micro