I am certainly new to Main Type. Thus, these might be both suggestions and questions regarding usability issues:
- Is there a way to quickly navigate through long lists of fonts, for example by starting to type the name of the font into the field at the top in the toolbar (similar to ms office)? Ahem, I have found the answer already in the forum (I had somehow no luck in the manual). OK, clicking into the font panes preview text and starting to type does the trick!
- Is there a way to view and work with zipped fonts?
lutz wrote:- Is there a way to view and work with zipped fonts?
Not that I know of.
BTW If you want to save space by archiving rarely used fonts, use 7-Zip (freeware) to archive fonts. Compression of TTF in LZMA format is much better than ZIP format.
Actually, I had used this feature ( working with compressed ttf files) in another font-manager without even knowing about it (I believe this is a really good sign). Switching to main type I had to notice that the fonts are actually still zipped.
I believe it would be neat if Maintype would automatically look into zip and 7zip files and would de-compress them on the fly.
Directory displays are significantly faster if fonts are zipped as the MS Operating System doesn't read each one to figure out its format (truetype or opentype) or something like that. Dealing with very large directories is a pain as it has to stop and think on each entry. If you skip ahead YOU must wait until the serial processing catches up...
Perhaps a proof is that the system goes very much faster when dealing with any other file type where it doesn't do this extra work.
I'm sure MT would not see any speed advantage as it would simple unzip each one before it did its usual processing and rezip afterwards(?). That's unfortunate.
I have found the answer already in the forum (I had somehow no luck in the manual). OK, clicking into the font panes preview text and starting to type does the trick! 