Font Forum

Recently, I had to find a new font manager, since my old one, Typograf, has become too unstable. I test drove about a dozen font managers and Main Type came out on top, due to its speed, stability, and the nice UI. However, I do have two suggestions. If there's a workaround, please let me know.

1. Many fonts in my current collection are stored in individual font dirs. Many font dirs contain some files besides the font itself, files like Readme.txt, License.doc, Adobe font metrics .atm, etc. I'd like to sort my fonts into groups, while preserving those files. Right now, when I move fonts into my groups, only the font files (ttf, otf, pfb, pfm) are moved. I have to move the other files manually, which is a chore. I wonder if Main Type could optionally pre-pend the font's name to all the non-font files in a directory and copy all those files along with the font? The renaming is necessary, otherwise I'd end up with files like Readme.txt overwriting each other.

2. My group structure is pretty complex. Whenever I access the Groups tree, its branches are always shown fully expanded. There are so many open branches, it's hard to quickly find the desired one. Could Main Type preserve the expansion status of the Groups tree, so that if I expand one branch and collapse the others, I'm presented with the exact same view next time I access Groups?

Thanks and keep up the good work.

Thanks for your positive feedback!

I've added your suggestions to the wish list. I guess most users will benefit from suggestion number 2, so that one has a slightly higher priority.

Thanks. As far as #1, I wrote a Perl script that looks for non-font files in my orig. dirs, cross-checks them with the sorted fonts in my groups folder, and renames/moves the files if a match is found.

I came up with two more wishlist items:

1. In the Preview Text pane, I wish I could collapse related fonts into one entry (say, all versions of Garamond), to make the preview less cluttered.

2. Some font managers (Typograf, Font Hit) nicely put the font name and path in small lettering right under the preview text, thus making the separate "Font name" and "Font path" columns in the Preview pane unnecessary. The saved space can be used for another column of font previews.

In later versions of MainType, files are not moved when fonts are added to groups.

The Group folder tree is collapsed on staring MainType.