Font Manager

[jaromeB]

Hey guys

 

What font manager is everyone using?

 

I'm currently using Rightfont but when I activate the fonts, they won't activate in AD.

 

Not tried another font manager but I wondered if this is a Rightfont issue or an AD issue, they activate in every other program ok which makes me think it's an AD issue.

 

Currently trying the latest Beta.

[jaromeB]

So it turns out I need to quit AD and open it back up for the font to activate.

[MEB]

Hi jaromeB,
Welcome to Affinity Forums

I'm using FontExplorer X Pro and it seems to be working fine with the retail version of Affinity Photo/Designer. Still have to check RightFont but you don't have to quit Affinity Designer to force-loading the activated font. Open the Preferences, go to the Miscellaneous section and press the Reset Fonts button.

 

 

[Oval]

On https://rightfontapp.com you can read:

 

You can double click to change selected text layers

You can change selected text layers with a simple click

You can copy font from RightFont and paste in

[dinoburner]

I didn't know anybody used apps other than Apple's standard FontBook 

[Grotesker]

Typeface (typeface.criminalbird.com) is handy and a good price. I tend to use FontBook to manage the fonts I use all the time but Typeface for browsing all the (000s) of others.

[abarkalo]

Here's my own review of RightFont, how I made it work for me, and my opinions of others including Mac's own Font Book - and why I think Font Book is lacking.  Also writing here because it works great in Affinity products.

 

First of all, as a designer like many of us here, I have thousands of fonts, and also I sometimes use Google Fonts, and since I have Adobe's Creative Cloud installed I also have TypeKit fonts.  That's a lot of stuff to manage.  Then I also have a desktop and a laptop, and organizing everything across different machines is a bit of a pain.

 

The issue with Font Book is that I had a mess with duplicate fonts, or in one machine I may not have had a font installed, and there is no cloud sync - each machine is on its own.  Also Google offers 1443 fonts (733 families) of fonts which is offers for free!  Granted not all of them are great but some are widely used like for web like Roboto, Open Sans etc.  If I wanted to install ALL of these Google fonts it would be a pain.  If I wanted to deactivate all except a few after I activated them all, it would seem like a lot of work.

 

I have a Dropbox folder called Installed Fonts.  I have deleted all User fonts from Font Book - don't need to add anything in there.  This sounds scary, I know, but be assured that when RightFont then activates your fonts, they will be in your system to use in all apps - but RightFont is taking the place of FontBook to manage.  All my fonts, whether in folders or just tons of fonts out of folders, is only in the Dropbox folder.  Thousands.  Since it's Dropbox it syncs across machines.  I created an alias of this folder and designed a cool ICNS font and the alias sits on my desktop.  OK so now when I download fonts to the desktop I just drag and drop to this alias desktop folder.  If I am dragging a font folder, into the fonts folder, I make sure to clean it up first.  If there are duplicate fonts - typically you get TTF and OTF types - I only keep OTF (it's better).  I take out any TXT info etc.

 

In RightFont, I have added the Dropbox font folder as a live folder.  I have also set the preferences to instantly activate all fonts as soon as they are added in.  You can also just go to the folder within RightFont, select all, activate all or deactivate all if you want to do things manually.  Next, in preferences you can add in Google fonts, either sort by name or font popularity.  They have already done all the integration - you don't need to go to Google Fonts itself.  Next, go to the Google Fonts folder, select all, activate all.  Presto done. 1433 fonts just added and activated.  If you have Creative Cloud installed, it will also list the Typekit folder. 

 

Activation/deactivation is super fast.  It took 3 minutes to activate over 3000 fonts and about two minutes for the entire Google library.  Try doing that with Font Book. 

 

Next what I do is start favoriting all fonts, and even create list folders - for one project or another, or perhaps lists like sketch fonts, handwritten, other very specific styles, etc.  Right now RightFont doesn't offer syncing of those non-live lists across multiple machines, although I emailed the developer and they said that it's probably coming in a future release.  Also I asked them about the ability to scan a JPEG/PNG or doc and identify fonts and also they don't do this now but are working on it for an upcoming release - that would be great. Right now, RightFont allows you to search between serif, sans, slab and then font weights, condensed type, to aid in your search. I found that feature ok, but could use some refinement. It certainly did filter the list but not accurately on occasion - maybe the font metadata was corrupt on some of my fonts, who knows. Good enough for now.  As for icon fonts that it offers, I find that less useful.  I subscribe to the Noun Project - and everyone here should ($40/year) and you have gazillions of icons that you can customize color and export as SVG or PNG - really useful for design work.

 

Which brings me to font identification:  Nothing does that really well.  Photoshop is so-so and I tested it with documents that I created from fonts I have installed - it wasn't very accurate most of the time. Affinity really needs to build that in because Suitcase Extensis (and I haven't tried FontExplorer so I can't comment on that here) and Font Genius (which is non-retina and really bad so don't try that!) are not so great.  Like many here, I use MyFonts.com's What the Font and, while that gives the results in MyFonts and fonts they want you to buy, it is really the best identifier and then you can search in RightFont to see if you have that font installed.  If you don't, you can get some hints for what you're trying to match, and then put in custom text in RightFont and start exploring away.   Also I have the WhatFont extension installed in Chrome.  If you're trying to match fonts on a web page then this extension is perfect, not even good, just perfect.  It identifies everything on the page (reading from HTML) and gives you the font name, size, leading and HEX code for the color used.  Just amazing.

 

Lastly... getting back to Affinity Designer, I am able to just select text and then go through RightFont and test all the lists, favorites or general list of fonts.  You can either select text or just the text layer and either way RightFont will quickly change the font.  Highly recommend.

 

 

[misc33]

Has anyone used FontBase? It's free, with optional $3/month subscription for extra features, and looks very promising. I'm struggling to figure out how to pare down the enormously long list of fonts that show up in Affinity Designer, as there doesn't seem to be documentation explaining it step by step. Any suggestions appreciated.

[Alexis]

After trying a lot of them in windows 10, I chose MainType. 

Most of them are really slow and weird to use.