Application for sorting my fonts

[sindredahl]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

Hi, after many years of clutter and storing my font files in random locations, time has come to make a change. I am therefore looking for an application that can sort and organize my fonts automatically. I do not wish to use it as a font-management software, but only for sorting my typefaces in neat categories and folders. PS: I use Mac.

[brockfrench]

By what criteria do you wish to sort and organize them automatically?

I presently store all of my fonts on a USB key using a 'tiered folder system' I defined for myself and use NexusFont to browse and otherwise manage... NexusFont is only available for Windows at the moment.

[Karl Stange]

Personally I find it intensely rewarding to manually sort, categorise and organise font files and data. I am particularly fascinated by the smaller details to do with formats, foundry/origin and encodings. Sorry, I know this doesn't really help you but I sympathise with what you are trying to achieve. For what it is worth I approach this kind of thing from a fairly linear point of view, sorting alphanumerically and then by family, origin, format and version. Good luck!

[sindredahl]

Id like to sort using the built in metadata in the font. I don't know what is the ultimate system of font sorting, but maybe Serif and Sans-serif at the top level. Then maybe Humanist and Geometric under Sans-Serif... I am guessing that there is no perfect solution for this. But which one is most common?

[Theunis de Jong]

There is no "most common" format because designers cannot decide what criteria to use and which are the most important :D

The only method that is generally adopted as a data field in Truetype and Opentype fonts (so not in Type 1 fonts) is PANOSE. You might give this Javascript a try, it's one for Illustrator:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/4172363

and see if it works for you (i.e., you have a font in mind and are able to find it using the script). If it does, then the Panose information is enough.

[Queneau]

Display and text fonts, condensed, expanded, extra-light or black, low or high x-height potential usage (books, packaging, greeting card etc.). It depends a lot on how you use the fonts to how you classify them (of course). Though I find the designations like humanist, transitional etc. interesting, I hardly ever use them to pick a font. The 'emotional' qualities of font are more important to me (friendly, rough, playful, neutral...)

I use Fontexplorer's classify function, to which I add a lot of own classifications. I sometimes use the smart set option to naarow down a selection based on some criteria (like: Serif, high x-height, text, low contrast)

[rongilad]

If I might add to the question, I have a mac and I'm using Font Book to organize my fonts into different collections. I'd like to keep track of the different license files, since I have some free and some purchased fonts with different license types. Any suggestions?

[jslabovitz]

I've used FontDoctor for years to organize my pool of fonts into a reasonable directory tree. It doesn't organize by category, but it does have options to organize by foundry and family name. It also does a wide variety of checks, conflicts, and repairs, which I think is useful.

It's now an Extensis product, available here: http://www.extensis.com/en/products/fontdoctor/index.jsp?ref=nav

I know you're not looking for a font manager, but I advise rethinking that line you're drawing in the sand. FontExplorer (by Linotype) is really good, and attempts to do categorization. I don't think it's very successful at that (as others have pointed out, it's a hard problem), but it might be worth a download of the 30-day trial. It does have a good system for both regular and smart sets of collections of fonts; I use that to keep track of, for example, all my OpenType fonts.

--John