10 Free Apps for Managing Your Fonts

By Jacob Gube

If you’re a typical designer or web developer, you probably have a large font collection. Having a sizable number of fonts can make finding the ideal font for a project a grueling effort, akin to a needle in a haystack scenario.

However, there are several free applications that can help you find, categorize, tag, preview, and install/uninstall your fonts. In this article, you’ll find 10 free applications that will help your better manage your font collection.

myFontbook

myFontbook is a free web application for organizing your installed fonts. It allows you to tag your fonts by keyword and gives you the ability to rate them so that you can quickly, making it easier to see your favorites. It has a pane for previewing fonts to help you in your font choices.

Notable features:

• Tagging and favorites lets you organize your fonts
• Metrics gives you insight about native letterspacing and line height of a font
• Body text preview provides realistic previewing of a selected font
• Proof sheet makes it easy to print font previews
• Being a webapp means that you can use it on any operating system

Font Book (Mac)

Font Book comes pre-installed in Apple computers and is a solid tool to use for font management if you’re an owner of a Mac. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface, a trademark of Mac apps, and it has amazing font/organization features.

Notable features:

• Organize, install, remove, search your font collection in one interface
• Sorts fonts by categories (i.e. Modern, Traditional, Web)
• Create custom categories to organize your font collection
• Comes standard with Macs, no installation needed

Fontmatrix (Windows/Linux)

Fontmatrix is an open source font manager for Linux users; though it was recently made to work with the Windows OS as well. It is a great font management tool for power users, and is ideally suited for developers who can take advantage of the script console to extend and customize the application.

Notable features:

• Tagging feature makes organization easier
• Script console lets you extend and customize the application
• Interface is intuitive
• Displays meta information about a font such as designer, copyright info, etc.

Font Picker (Windows/Mac/Linux/Web Browser)

Font Picker is a free Adobe AIR desktop application that lets you manage and view your font collection. It’s simple and straightforward and can run in any operating system that can run the Adobe AIR framework. It also has a web-based version so that will search your  machine for installed fonts.

Notable features:

• Ability to mark fonts as favorites
• Remove fonts that you don’t like
• Simple and straightforward

sFont (Windows)

sFont is a free Windows font management tool that has a uncomplicated interface. Organize your font collection by tagging certain fonts as favorites. Quickly find TrueType or non-TrueType fonts using the Filter feature. You can review your fonts in a variety of ways including the ability to change the background and foreground colors.

Notable features:

• Add fonts to a favorites list
• Charmap view gives you a matrix preview of a font’s characters
• Customize colors to see fonts in different colors
• Filter feature lets you pick out TrueType or non-TrueType fonts

FindThatFont! (Windows/Linux)

FindThatFont is a simple and free tool for preview and categorize all the fonts installed in your system. You can organize fonts within the 30 categories that the application has. There’s also an extensibility featured called Extension manager for developers who’d like to customize how FindThatFont! works.

Notable features:

• Tag your fonts in one or more of the 30 categories
• Created using XUL language just like Firefox and Thunderbird
• Extension manager for developers to customize and extend the tool

Fonts++ (Windows)

Fonts++ is for Windows PC users that have many fonts installed on their computer. You can deactivate your unused fonts so that you don’t have to see your entire collection when looking at your fonts. You can also install/uninstall fonts with this app instead of the traditional Windows method

Notable features:

• Activate/deactivate fonts to help you navigate your collection
• Install/uninstall TrueType fonts quickly
• Small resource footprint

Cfont Pro (Windows)

Cfont Pro allows you to preview fonts even before you install them, a helpful feature if you have a external hard drive or portable media device that has fonts. It has proof sheets in case you want to print out fonts for reviewing purposes. The property viewer displays a ton of information about your fonts.

Notable features:

• Proof sheets allows you to print out font previews
• Property viewer lets you display font meta data
• Character Magnifier lets you zoom in and out to inspect font characters

Font Xplorer (Windows)

Font Xplorer is a popular freeware desktop application for managing your font collection. It has a filtering feature so that you can hone in on specific types of fonts. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support Adobe Type 1, OpenType fonts with PostScript outlines, which may be a deal breaker for some designers.

Notable features:

• Browse installed and uninstalled fonts
• Print sheets allow you to print out fonts using one of the apps templates
• Comprehensive font information is displayed
• Font Repair Wizard helps you repair font files

AMP Font Viewer (Windows)

AMP Font Viewer is an easy to use but robust font manager for Windows. It has support for a wide variety of font formats such as TrueType, OpenType, and Type1 fonts. It allows you to easily install multiple fonts, as well as removing installed fonts. There are several options for categorizing your font collection, which will help you tame your massive font collection.

Notable features:

• Several previewing options are available
• Several management options
• Supports most font formats
• Search feature gives you advanced search options

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• Related categories: Tools and Graphic Design

About the Author

Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He’s also a web developer/designer who specializes in front-end development (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) and PHP development. If you’d like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.

This was published on Dec 2, 2009