Whats a good font management application for Windows?
After some searching and testing myself, I found Bitstream Font Navigator to be among the best available. It’s what I now use to manage the few thousand fonts on my system. It’s not super-feature rich, but it’s fast, stable, and supports TrueType, Opentype, and PostScript fonts. Once you spend a little time with it and define your font groups, you’re good to go. Bitstream disontinued the product and sold it to Corel after version 4 (which lacked OpenType support, ugh), and Corel now bundles version 5 (with OpenType, yay) with the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite. Unfortunately, this is now the only way to get the application. Fortunately, you can download the Grapics Suite trial package from Corel’s web site, and the Font Navigator doesn’t expire when the trial period runs out. See this blog entry for more details and instructions in the comments section on how to unpack the (pretty big) installer and manually extrac
OT1 Font Manager is good, not free though. Font Tools is good and free, though a bit buggy and reinstalls itself (from the orignial installation file, which if you don’t have it pops up error messages) if you delete or move its icons on your desktop or start menu, which is amazingly annoying and stupid.
I use a combination of programs, each with their pros and cons, and am always searching for better ones. akFontViewer (which is old) is great for quickly viewing installed fonts in whatever customized text I choose and the character map is great. Font Lister is good for viewing fonts in a folder and installing them directly from the program. And I like the way Opcion handles font ‘favorites.’ A list from a year ago of what I want from a perfect font management program: • Read fonts in my system font directory as well as any non-system directory to which I point it. • List every font with my personalized text; don’t make me click on the font before I can see what ‘pancakes’ looks like in it. • Have customizable meta-data fields and/or tags so I can sort by font type, weight, mood, etc. • Have the option to show only the fonts I have selected/saved/
