Export/Share Font Groups (not actual font files)

MainType - Font Manager MainType - Requests and Enhancements
1

I’ve posted on this a couple of times with previous versions and am interested to know if anyone has developed a best practice around it.

We work as a group with a central file server where all of our font files are housed. Our workflow typically has one person develop a given project and another person pick up the process to work on more design elements. In short, we collaborate on most projects.

We typically create a group in MainType with the fonts used on a project and name the group accordingly.

When font selections are finalized, we take a screen shot of the group and send it to each team member who then builds a copy of it on their on workstation. Obviously this is cumbersome and not at all efficient - particularly if the font selections change for any reason.

We did experiment with creating an actual folder on the server for the project fonts, but quickly realized we would be duplicating font files (unnecessary storage) and in order to include them in each installation, have to add that folder to our Font Folders in MainType.

What I’m really looking for is a ‘list’ of fonts that can be imported as a group file (not actual font files) that could be easily imported.

In years long gone by, Corel’s Font Manager actually did this (and still does). I recently played with that program a bit and it now exports an .xml file which points contains “pointers” to the various fonts in a group. When you import the .xml file, it creates and/or updates a Collection to include whatever is in the .xml file.

So, to return to the first sentence: has anyone developed a good way of managing project fonts such that they are not duplicated?

2

I understand your concern about having separate font files per project, since that would indeed create duplicates on your server whenever the same font is used in multiple projects.

A “font list” file containing only references to fonts could serve as a kind of virtual group that can be imported and shared. Of course, the fonts themselves would still need to be known to MainType, or the list would have to include references to the actual font files.

This isn’t currently possible, but it’s definitely something we can consider for a future version of MainType, especially if more users request it. So if others would also find this useful, please do let us know.

3

Of course. I looked through the xml file created by Corel’s application and it contains both the path to the font files, as well as the embedded names. I suppose this way, should you have font files on your local computer that MainType knows about, it would simply reference those and perhaps give you the option to install from the path specified for those fonts not already in your library. In our case, all of our fonts are stored on a central server, so the path will be the same for all users. The main issue is the list of fonts.