Last time I checked I have over 1000 fonts. Many of those are system required, but there is a vast majority that I have picked up because they are perfect for a project I am working on or inspire me to work on. After all, who wants to write in Comic Sans or Lucinda Handwriting all the time, especially on memory pages? We want subtlety or impact with a simple keystroke – powerful stuff they are.
Having all of those wonderful fonts can cause a few problems. The first problem in most programs we use, is that they get bogged down as we add more fonts, slowing down our process. A common complaint, but we really can’t help it! Have you seen some of the fonts the team has been sharing here on the blog? Secondly, organizing becomes a real time waster when I want to find a specific font. What if I am looking just for a title font or a printed/handwritten option for journaling, or even a type writer design? Scrolling through 1200 fonts is not easy, and we want to share a couple of ways to organize and view them easier for workflow.
I stumbled upon two font viewers that we will review here since we have some practical experience with them.:
These options operate in a very similar fashion. You can type a sample of words at the top of the webpage, and the page will show you a preview with the fonts currently installed on your system. I prefer wordmark.it as that site allows you to change the size of the font, as well as change to aa/Aa/AA with a click. You don’t realize this important ability until you search for fonts that are only capital letters or lowercase.
Recently, I was directed to
NexusFont. It is a simple unassuming font manager. It allows the user to tag fonts, and create virtual folders “storage”, and best of all … to uninstall fonts from your system without losing them! It’s super easy to use from the start and there are simple instructions and FAQ’s posted in the site.
I began by copying all the fonts from my font folder to a separate “spare” folder for ease and reference. Then I compared my list to a list of Microsoft system fonts, and deleted the ones that I’d downloaded. Once everything was still working, I deleted the system fonts out of the “spare” folder, and told NexusFont to look at that folder for fonts.
Now all you do is open NexusFont before you open your scrap/photo program to work on projects. This “tricks” PSE into thinking that you have all the fonts in Nexus installed, but you don’t! PSE not only runs faster now, and I have the added benefit of an way to organize fonts to make them easier to find!
NexusFont is for use in most PC’s and even I-phones in app form. The Mac users I spoke with just use Font Book for it’s compatibility.We hope this helps you start the new year with a simple trick to stay ahead of the organizing your memory keeping tools.
Oh this sounds really neat, Danyale! Thanks! I think it will be a wonderful New Year’s project. I’ve been getting messages that I have > 500 fonts on my system and was wondering what I should do about them since not ALL are used regularly. 🙂 Wonderful solution! Thank YOU!
I’m glad something was shared that will work for you! I’m loving it. Lots and lots of fonts and no warnings from my computer.
I have been struggling with finding a way to utilize all the fonts I have…this will be perfect once I get it set up. THANKS so much for sharing!!!
You are so welcome, Kathy!
I love this! I use Nexus and love the two folder thing. I had no idea that would work like that. I HATE seeing all the system fonts when looking through them!