Fontcase is the newest way to store and organize your font collection. This is what Font Book should have been. Organizing and using your fonts has never been easier. Fontcase lets you use tags and smart collections to manage your collection, making it easier to quickly enable and disable fonts by sets and usage. The release is still an early preview, so we can be sure that the app will be much better when it goes public. Keep that in mind while reading this review.
When you first run the app, it will import your existing font collection from Font Book, and then bring you to the gorgeous main screen.
In the main section of the window, it will list all your fonts in a thumbnail styled box. A slider in the bottom of the window will let you resize the thumbnails to your liking. One of the features I like most is the previews available in Fontcase. When looking for the right font, a preview with a large quantity of text is best, and Fontcase has it. Underneath all the font icons are three tabs. Characters, Waterfall, and Body Text.
Preview your fonts
Characters will show you all the special characters available in that font. Waterfall is a quick preview of the font. It has three options, A-H in upper and lower case, a few special characters, and 0-9; the entire alphabet, a-z in lower case, or Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs, which contains every letter of the alphabet. You can also create previews of your own text strings, for instance, check out what “Smoking Apples” would look like in any selected font.
Body text gives you a three column magazine style text preview, with the text being Lorem Ipsum, normal or all caps, Old French, gibberish, quenya, or klingon for you trekkie fans. Overall the preview features are miles ahead of what Font Book offers [Ed: Or any other font manager for that matter] and give you a very good idea of what a font will look like in real world usage.
Compare fonts
Fontcase has an excellent way for you to compare two or more fonts. Just select them in the main window and hit the compare button. You can then switch between character, waterfall or body text to view those fonts side by side.
Organizing fonts
Fonts can quickly be enabled or disabled just by right-clicking on them and selecting (de)activate font. If you hit Get Info on a font, it will give you an iTunes like info window, which will let you change details, and add or remove tags. This is a really useful window for organizing your fonts. For instance, if you have fonts from the same foundary but a slightly different name, you can make them go together by editing the details. You can also set ratings and add tags to further organise your collection.
Easy Access
The sidebar offers further structure to your font organisation. You can choose between font genres, tags, create smart collections, or manually organise fonts into collections. Fontcase also pays a lot of attention to the font designer, as there’s a whole section listing out the font designers.
I’ve never really used a font organizer before, but I instantly fell in love with Fontcase. Not only is it beautiful (it was designed by Laurent Baumann), it is very simple to use. The interface is very intuitive, and features the right amount of core animation graphics for some visual awesomeness. So much so that I’ve been looking for nice fonts to use lately, just so I can put them in Fontcase.
Is it going to be awesome?
Remember that Fontcase is still in beta, so if you don’t like what you see, wait a while before you make your opinion. Of course, if you like what you see (we’re pretty confident of that), it’s only going to get better. For updates on this app you can keep a watch on the Fontcase homepage.
