I read another thread that was sort of on this topic, but not exactly what I was looking for.
Is there a way for MainType to offer the opportunity to clean up duplicate font FILES. You can see in this screen cap, for example, I have four (yes, FOUR) files for Century Condensed. Of course, this is from years of accumulating files, upgrading computers, etc., and need to be cleaned up - to conserve disk space if nothing else. I just don’t know where to start…
Nobody else seems to have any suggestions.
The obvious thing to try first would be to look in your DropBox folder for the file names, and delete all but the most recent one, or inspect each of them in FontCreator before deciding which is the best one to keep.
Why would you bother to do this, as MainType will show the font only once anyway?
Is it to save some disk space?
Yes, as stated in the first post. This could certainly be an issue for free users of DropBox with only 1.5 Gbytes available.
There is a fast but unconventional way. I suggest you first make a local backup of all your fonts, just to be sure.
In MainType select all fonts within the font library, and click export. This way you will have all your fonts in a single folder.
Next delete all fonts folders from Dropbox, and copy the exported fonts to Dropbox. You will now have a single resource per font stored in a flat folder.
We could implement some more advanced way of removing duplicates if more people need it.
I very much like MainType, but do think a bit more comprehensive way to delete fonts would be helpful. I have well over 30,000 fonts on my system, sync’d on dropbox and downloaded to three computers. I know for sure, that many of these are duplicates, but manually deleting individual font files would obviously be time prohibitive.
Thanks for your response.
Clayton
What would you suggest?
It’s not straightforward to do it automatically. Two font files could be duplicates in every respect except that one has a € character while the other does not. One would want to delete the version without the € character, not the one with it.
If, like me, you edit fonts, you can have several versions with exactly the same set of characters, but some minor difference in kerning pairs or OpenType features.
Automatically tagging fonts as duplicates would be useful, then users could manually check which version(s) to delete.