Restoring a deleted font

[Dice236]

Howdy. New to MainType, and to font managers in general. I've tried out several today, and so far this one has definitely been the easiest to use and the most effective. Love the interface, very slick. Anyways, on to my question. I clicked on one of my groups and deleted a font using the option "Delete font from MainType." I didn't really want to get rid of it for good, though. How do I tell MainType to stop ignoring that font so that I can add it back to my library?

[León Fridsma]

Howdy. New to MainType, and to font managers in general. I've tried out several today, and so far this one has definitely been the easiest to use and the most effective. Love the interface, very slick. Anyways, on to my question. I clicked on one of my groups and deleted a font using the option "Delete font from MainType." I didn't really want to get rid of it for good, though. How do I tell MainType to stop ignoring that font so that I can add it back to my library?

For the moment you can't. See my post here

León

[Dice236]

Thanks for the heads up. I uninstalled/reinstalled to reset everything, so going from here I'll avoid deleting anything inside MainType. Other than that, I'm really liking this font manager a lot. Excellent program.

[Erwin Denissen]

For now you can use other means, like give such fonts a bad rating, or move them to a specific group (.e.g. unused).

[Dice236]

I want to follow up on this with a few more questions. I seem to be misunderstanding how MainType works when it comes to managing fonts.

I thought that when I specified a font folder, like "My Documents/Fonts", I was seeing that directory in my Groups panel and could browse all my fonts from there. I could then make changes in windows explorer, like add a new subfolder of fonts, and click the Refresh button in MainType to update the view. This apparently isn't how it works, since my new subfolder didn't appear when I clicked Refresh.

I read some of the user manual after that. So fonts that you add to MainType all go into your Library, which is kept in some kind of database file? And you organize them by creating a directory structure in the Groups panel and dragging the fonts over from the Library view? So do you guys add your new fonts to MainType and then delete them from your font folder, or do you try to keep your font folder and your Groups panel in sync? I guess what my question boils down to is, if some day down the road I decided to switch to a different font manager, and I had deleted everything from "My Documents/Fonts" so that my fonts were only in MainType's database file, is it possible to get my fonts from that file so that they could be used by the other software?

Also, how do I move fonts around in the Groups panel? For example, I click Folder A, drag a font from that folder to Folder B, and it looks like it just makes a copy instead of actually moving it. So the font now appears in 2 folders. I'm assuming a copy of the font hasn't actually been made in my Library, though. So are the folders in the Groups panel more like tags than an actual directory?

I hope those questions made sense. Like I said, I'm new to font managers so I'm still trying to get my head around how all of this works. Anyways, thanks for your help.

[Erwin Denissen]

I thought that when I specified a font folder, like "My Documents/Fonts", I was seeing that directory in my Groups panel and could browse all my fonts from there. I could then make changes in windows explorer, like add a new subfolder of fonts, and click the Refresh button in MainType to update the view. This apparently isn't how it works, since my new subfolder didn't appear when I clicked Refresh.

MainType 4 uses a database to store in which groups you've added your fonts, so don't expect it to be in sync with fonts in specific folders on your file system. The refresh feature will only look for new and modified copies of font files. Such fonts won't be automatically added to existing groups.

I guess what my question boils down to is, if some day down the road I decided to switch to a different font manager, and I had deleted everything from "My Documents/Fonts" so that my fonts were only in MainType's database file, is it possible to get my fonts from that file so that they could be used by the other software?

If you ever consider doing that, please tell us why, so we can try to keep you as a customer! At all times you can export fonts to your file system. Just select one or more fonts within the font list panel, and right-click one of these selected fonts and select Export.

Also, how do I move fonts around in the Groups panel? For example, I click Folder A, drag a font from that folder to Folder B, and it looks like it just makes a copy instead of actually moving it. So the font now appears in 2 folders.

You can cut, copy, and paste them from and to groups. You can also drag-n-drop, optionally hold down the CTRL key to move instead of copy between groups.

I'm assuming a copy of the font hasn't actually been made in my Library, though. So are the folders in the Groups panel more like tags than an actual directory?

They are just a reference to the font. It takes only a couple of bytes storage if you add a font to a group, so be free to add a font to numerous groups if that's how you want to organize your fonts.