With Leopard, Apple has finally made Font Book a good enough default font manager for the Mac. Everything from auto activation to error correction and managing your fonts in different collections is available in Font Book. Here’s a brief run down on what Font Book can do for you. [Ed note: In case you haven’t even noticed its existence yet, it’s right there in your Applications folder. Duh.]

Organising your Fonts
We all have those times when we freak out on fonts. [Ed note: OK, maybe not *all*, but I’m sure at least some of you have experienced *font mania* every once in a while.] Hitting site after site, we amass a huge number of fonts over time. And when it comes time to search for one particular font in that huge collection, we rue our poor font management skills.

But if you use a Mac, you’re lucky, because OS X can handle a lot of fonts with ease. And with Font Book, the basics of font organisation are taken care of for you. Font Book automatically makes fixed width and web-friendly categories, and if you install Microsoft Office for Mac, a separate category is made for that as well. However, you do need to go a little further then this to achieve true font management nirvana. 

The first thing you need to do is create a bunch of categories that bring meaning to your fonts. Let’s start with a Fancy category. You could use the default Fun category for this as well. Grab all those swirly, non-conventional fonts and dump them in that category. You can then safely turn it off to save you a whole lot of resources. Remember, every time you select the Type tool in Photoshop, it renders previews of all available fonts. And the more fonts you have, the slower it will get.

Next, you need a Foreign language category. Chinese, Arabic, and any other non-English fonts you have can be added to this one. And then turn the whole thing off. If you do need to turn on one of those fonts, you can do so without having to turn on the entire category. If you come across an Arabic website, it will show you ‘???’ instead of the Arabic type. Of course, leave those fonts on if you can read Arabic in the first place. You will be surprised by how many foreign language fonts reside in your library. I found 56 typefaces myself, and I’m the sort who never even manages to find his own socks. 

Use your imagination with creating categories. In addition to the default ones, I’ve created categories for my favourite Sans Serif and Serif fonts, a category for Ornamental type and another one for Cursive type. This allows me to quickly choose fonts in any Cocoa application by bringing up the Fonts panel (Command+T). Unfortunately, the Fonts panel will not show up in Photoshop due to its Carbon code.

Remember, though, that turning fonts off is much better than deleting them entirely. Fonts hardly use up any disk space and turning them off is as good as their not existing in your fonts panel at all. Deleting fonts will, in all probability, come back to haunt you in your typographic dreams (and no, I do not have dreams about typography—oh, who am I kidding, I’m a nerd). 

Don’t scamper away just yet, there’s more after the jump…

Resolving font issues
If you are an aggressive font collector, more often than not, one of those fonts goes rogue. You might find your Safari browser showing junk text on certain pages or that your font has been changed to some cursive style all over your desktop. Trust me, a lot of cursive does not a merry Milind make.

Luckily, you don’t have to go through turning off/on all those fonts to single out the culprit, because Font Book has a very useful validation feature. Select all your fonts and hit File » Validate Fonts. Font Book will now go through all your fonts and try to find the ones making the mess. Anything marked red should be removed from the library immediately. Use the yellow warning only to resolve errors like garbled fonts.

The validation tool also shows font duplicates, if any exist. Clearing those will free up memory and improve performance on applications dependent on fonts (especially Adobe CS3 apps). Although, if removing duplicates is the only thing you want to do, then using the Edit » Resolve Duplicates feature will clear up the mess must faster and more efficiently.

Font Activation
Turn off all those fonts you are sure you don’t use but just might need in the future. Turning off fonts in Font Book is as simple as right clicking on them and turning them off. You can even disable entire font collections if you so choose. This will reduce memory usage as well as clear out the clutter—how many variations of Helvetica do you need anyway, you font-o-maniac, you!

Apple also introduced auto font activation with Leopard. If a document requires a font that has been turned off in the library, OS X will offer to activate it for you automatically (ka-ching!)—or, at least, that’s how it is supposed to work. Right out the box though, auto activation doesn’t work in one of the most major applications that it is required in: Adobe CS3! This is mainly because Adobe still uses Carbon instead of Cocoa, but the feature is a complete waste. Not only that, it doesn’t even work with Apple’s own TextEdit or iWork applications. Truth be told, I’m not sure which applications it does work in. So don’t go betting your life on this feature (yeah, as if you’d bet your life on a font!) as it might cause you some grief at a crucial moment.

Printing font sheets
If you design for print, judging font sizes onscreen can be tough. Printing those fonts will go a long way towards helping you choose the right font and size. Font Book offers three different modes for printing—Catalog lists out a simple alphabet for all the font styles in that font family; Repertoire puts all the font chracters including glyphs, symbols, and other font features into a grid; and Waterfall, the one with the fanciest name, lists out the alphabet, starting with the smallest size and gradually increasing till it reaches the largest one. All three are useful in their own ways.

I, however, sometimes need a little more than just the alphabets in a row to judge a font (superhuman being that I am!) and have made a custom InDesign document for the purpose. Just change the font in the master style and it will reflect over the entire document. Of course, you will need InDesign CS3 or later to access this file.

Font Book is one of those applications that doesn’t draw too much attention to itself but still happens to be one of the killer features of OS X. [Ed note: Compare it to lumping all your fonts together in some plain jane folder (‘C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\’, for example) and you’ll know what he means.] Hope you liked this little writeup. If you have any comments or questions about Font Boot, the Andaman Islands, or the state of cows in India, please leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you.