Font Browser for Mac?

Font Book? it comes installed with OS X, doesn't it?

 

Is Font Book not working out?

 

What version of OSX are you using?

Isn't that what Font Book does?

Woof, Woof - Dawg

 

Have you tried using Font Book? It's shipped on all Macs (well all Macs with 10.4 or later)...

 

Font Book is worthless as a font browser. You can only view one individual font and style at a time, and Font Book cannot manage large quantities of fonts. Further, there is no sophisticated search mechanism for finding fonts by any means other than by name. I use Suitcase Fusion, which lets you see multiple fonts at once, view all the glyphs for a font, has floating previews (lets you see font samples overlaid on your document, search for fonts in a variety of ways, and find fonts similar to a selected font using glyph comparisons.

 

I like FontCase myself. Admittedly not that much more than FontBook, but it's very stylish.

 

I've read mixed reviews about FontCase and most said it was buggy. Interestingly, there are no current reviews for it anywhere online (all dated 2010 or older). Also, last I heard, it doesn't support auto-activation - which really isn't needed for a font browser, but nice to have so infrequently used fonts will install themselves (temporarily) when a document is opened.

So I just downloaded the trial version of FontCase and tried it out, after reading all the negative reviews about it on their site. It's a bad application, in my opinion. Like Font Book, you need to select a font for previewing - there is no simple preview browsing of typefaces. It took several font selections before I was even given the option of previewing all glyphs for a font. (My first selection of Zaph Dingbats would only give foreign language preview options.)

Somebody really ought to code a decent font browser (note, browser, not manager) for OS X. Font Book can manage fonts just fine for most users, but it's seriously lacking in terms of browsing and searching.

 

Agreed. I use FontExplorerX for font management, but as you say it has limited search capabilities. If you happen to have an iPad, fontShop has a great app named FontBook that is a digital version of their legendary printed specimen book; it has some very nice search-and-browse capabilities. For example, you can search by use case, by foundry, by designer, and so on. I typically pull something out of FontBook and then go activate it in FontExplorerX.

That don't help with font that aren't in FontBook, but it's a start.

Also, if you use InDesign there's a plugin that will generate a specimen page for each activated font.

Perry

 

I tried FontExplorerX and it fails to generate previews for some standard fonts, again such as Zapf Dingbats. Tech support (after over a week of waiting for a reply!) simply said some fonts have their glyphs on non-alphanumeric characters. That's interesting, being that the glyphs ARE on a-z characters. The effective absence of customer service and lack of accurate font previews had me uninstall my trial version before the time even expired. I use Suitcase Fusion 3, but it fails to accept some fonts that Font Book handles with no problem. SF3 also has no auto-activation for anything but a very select few high-end applications.

Tried Font Sleuth this morning and it also fails to preview some fonts correctly. Still looking for a decent browser...