Fontcase: Elegant Font Management for Mac OS X

When it comes to font management on the Mac, almost everyone immediately thinks Font Book.  Apple’s built-in font manager is great for simple font management, but it really doesn’t cut it when it comes to people who really want to organize their fonts in the greatest way possible.  Take a look at Fontcase,  a stunningly designed app designed to truly manage all of your fonts, the way you want to.

Apple introduced a lot of features in Mac OS X Panther.  Some features were more popular than others — take Exposé, for example.  One highly desired app finally made it into the OS’s web of pre-built-in software utilities called Font Book.  Font Book was designed for simple font management that allows you to organize your fonts and access them quickly when needed.  Though this app is effective, it hasn’t seen a major change in two major operating system updates, and still features the same three column design.  Though affective, Fontcase has shown that there is a better way to do this.

Fontcase’s interface is very streamlined and quite stress-free to work with.  Using elements from iLife and the Finder, Fontcase seems to blend in with the rest of your Mac’s applications.  The sidebar on the right-hand side of the app’s main window is used to help you navigate and organize your fonts.  The main section is where your fonts are shown.  Below the main section is an area dedicated to the selected font.  It includes 3 main tabs: Glyphs — which are the actual characters, Waterfall — a view showing the font with a sentence of choice, and Body Text — which shows your font in paragraph form arranged in a couple columns.

Viewing Fonts

Think of fonts that have multiple styles like they are “Events” in iPhoto.  Simply move your mouse across a font with multiple styles to see a preview of them appear inside the font’s icon.  These fonts do not have to be activated on your computer in order for Fontcase to view them.  You can then press the Spacebar to take a “QuickLook” of the font in a preloaded sentence that displays all of the alphabetic characters.  To view each character more closely, click on the Glyphs tab at the bottom.  You can then double click on a character look at it more closely.

Comparing fonts is one of Fontcase’s greatest features.  Select two or more fonts and hit the  button, also known as the compare button.  Fontcase shows you a bunch of columns allowing you to compare each glyph in a cleanly spaced view.  You can use the iPhoto-like slider at the bottom to change the size of each character.

Clicking the Header Text tab above does exactly what you think it does — it shows you what the fonts would look like if they were used as header text.

A really useful feature is the ability to compare the fonts in a body text-like view.  To do this, click the Body Text tab.  You can then change the alignment and filler text to better choose the correct font for your project.

Organizing Fonts

Like any good app for the Mac, Fontcase organizes your fonts into playlist-like collections to better access them.  To create a new collection, press Apple + Shift + N to bring down the “New” sheet.  Enter a name and hit Add.  All you have to do now is drag the fonts into the collection to better organize them.

To create a new Smart Collection, bring down the “New” sheet and choose Smart Collection from the toolbar.

Now you can have Fontcase automatically fill a collection with fonts that conform to the attributes you set to the Smart Collection.

As if that wasn’t enough, tagging is also available in Fontcase.  To tag a font with any particular tag, select a font and hit Command + I to “Get Info”. 

Go down to the “Tags” section and type away.  Fontbook automatically adds an item in the sidebar for each tag for better browsing.

Sharing Fonts

Now that you have your fonts organized, it’s time to share them with everyone at the office.  Fontcase makes this extremely easy by using Apple’s zero-configuration technology called Bonjour.  Go to Fontcase > Preferences… or press Command + , and choose “Sharing” to activate it.  Just like in iTunes, you can now browse other people’s font libraries – except this time you can copy their fonts and download them to your computer.

If you’re worried about how your font will look when using it for print, why not let Fontcase print a preview page for you?  Choose File > Print or press Command + P when you have a font selected to create a nicely designed preview page containing all of the information you need.

Performance

Fontcase really runs like a charm.  I have not run into any bugs when using this app.  The bugginess of a beta has left this now (at the time of writing) version 1.05 of Fontcase.  Though I couldn’t find the specs for the app on their webpage, it looks as if you need Mac OS X Leopard to take full advantage of the app and its font organizing abilities.  Speed “like any app on the Mac” will vary depending on your processor and memory size.  Fontcase does generate the previews you see in each icon automatically, however if you’d like to get it all over and done with, choose File > Generate Previews… and Fontcase will create all of you previews.  As stated in the sheet above, depending on your library “and system specs”, this might take a while.  If your library is massive, choose this option when you’re on break, or before bed.

Pricing and Availability

Fontcase is available at http://www.bohemiancoding.com/?Fontcase for the price of $46 (USD).  You can also get a family pack of 5 licenses for $68 (USD) and a Business pack of 10 licenses for $261 (USD).

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