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FontMinder
Font Hounds' Nightmares Are Over
In a review I wrote of FontMinder 1.1 recently I said that FontMinder is such a useful and even essential computing tool that Microsoft should have tried to license the program to include with Windows as an Accessory or even an applet in the Control Panel. FontMinder 2.5 is even better. This is one of those products that quietly resides on my hardrive and does it's vital job without making much noise. It's hard to imagine how I ever got along without it and not having this handy utility's icon located in several group windows is an unspeakably horrible thought. This is a must have program.
1996
Basically what FontMinder does is allow you to easily and quickly organize your fonts into groups or "fontpacks" so you can load only those fonts you need for a particular job thus allowing programs to load and run faster and allowing you to find and select fonts faster. There are a variety of other nice things it does but the main feature is well worth the $79.95 list price ($29.95 upgrade) to any font hound or normal font user.
I'll admit it—I'm a font hound. I have thousands of the little fellers and I want to collect them all. I want to be able to get at them and use them quickly and easily. I don't want to have to pull one off a disk or CD when I just want to see how a particular font looks in a layout. I want quick access to lots of fonts so I can try out a lot of different ones to achieve exactly the look I want. But early on in my font addiction I learned that loading lots of Type 1 fonts for a PostScript printer or lots of TrueType slows down Windows, PageMaker and other programs and makes scrolling through long lists of fonts time consuming and impractical. FontMinder allows me to have my font cake and eat it too.
He Who Dies With the Most Fonts Wins
When I first got FontMinder 1.1 I created several font packs based on common typeface characteristics. I made groups of script typefaces, serif typefaces, sans serif typefaces, old English and decorative typefaces. With FontMinder 2.5 TrueType and Type 1 fonts coexist peacefully in the same fontpack. But I found that although those groups were useful I was better off organizing my fonts by projects. I created a fontpack to do CAD work, a fontpack that includes all the fonts I need for a newsletter I produce and a fontpack that includes typefaces used in National Computer Tectonics. When I work on Tectonics I load my Tectonics fontpack and sometimes my AdvertisingHeadlines fontpack (a group I created that includes interesting display typefaces). This allows me to work with a minimum of fonts loaded. I'm almost certainly not going to use fancy delicate scripts while working on Tectonics but if I do want one I can just drag and drop it onto my list of active fonts or add it to a fontpack I'm using. And get this—I don't have to restart Windows to make all these font changes happen! Also my ATM.INI and WIN.INI stay slim and trim—no more clogged font arteries slowing down Windows and program loading.
FontMinder works seamlessly with TrueType and Adobe Type Manager and doesn't care where the fonts are located on your hardrive. You can have them scattered all over and FontMinder will search them out and give you a list of what you've got. FontMinder lets you print a variety of sample pages that have a wide left margin so you can three hole punch them and keep them in a three ring binder. I like to lean back, put my feet on the desk and browse through my typeface samples leisurely choosing the most appropriate ones.
If you haven't caught on to FontMinder yet you need to. If you have more than 10 fonts you must have this tool and if you have over 100 fonts (who doesn't) get out your Egghead catalogue and order it immediately.
Basically what FontMinder does is allow you to easily and quickly organize your fonts into groups or "fontpacks" so you can load only those fonts you need for a particular job thus allowing programs to load and run faster and allowing you to find and select fonts faster. There are a variety of other nice things it does but the main feature is well worth the $79.95 list price ($29.95 upgrade) to any font hound or normal font user.
