Fonts

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Fonts

OMG, someone come over and sort out my fonts for me!

I decide on a foolproof sorting system, spend hours sorting them, and then I don't like it, and it's awful, and I can't find anything and ARGH!

That's it. Thanks for listening.

smiley oh no! No way of fixing it? Like dump'em back into one folder?

Mind sharing your system? Mine is really none: one folder and then look at them in Nexus til I get tired... lol love playing with fonts in ai but still looking for a font sys.....

I'm with Bina. Try moving the fonts back to a single folder (or if they're already in a single folder, see if moving them to a different one breaks the tags in your management software).

My system is to leave all the CU fonts in one folder, PU-only fonts in another (and they'll probably end up deleted because I never use them anymore), and then I use NexusFont to tag the fonts and make collections for smaller projects.

It is very tempting to just dump them all together and start afresh, but it took me so long to sort them out in the first place!

I recently did a huge cull of my PU fonts. I had so many but they were pretty useless, so I got ruthless. I only kept the ones I absolutely cannot part with.

As for CU fonts, I have 2,274. I split them into smaller categories that I thought would help with my workflow, but some categories still end up with 300+ fonts that, lets face it, look super similar. Especially script fonts and basic serif / san serif fonts.

I'm drowning in those pretty script fonts. I've got fancy script fonts and handwriting script fonts and cutesy script fonts and calligraphy scripts. I think script fonts make up at least a third of my collection. Sometimes it's just overwhelming looking for the one I want because they all look the freaking same! But they looked really pretty in the previews so I had to have them!

Then I end up using the same 5 fonts for everything anyway. smiley

I do like NexusFont but it's so laggy on my PC so I use FontBase. Which has a very pretty interface and mostly does what I need it to do, but I like the simplicity of NexusFont.

Maybe I just need to overhaul my categories. Or I could get over it because they're just fonts. smiley

I generally have the same problem sorting my digiscrap supplies. It just gets overwhelming when there's so much of it and even the most efficient system isn't enough to find what you want. Damn those pretty, pretty freebies.

I'm in the "got over it they're just fonts" camp! lol

I sorta use Font Base...but, meh...nothing really worked well, and at that point I felt like I was wasting design time working on a problem that was barely a problem.

I did the same thing for brushes, I have ABR Mate, and it's about the same, it is semi helpful, I guess...lol

And yes, same for digi-supplies. In just my personal use I have almost 50 GB of stuff that's over 50,000 files! It's crazy!

As for commercial use, in just DigitalScrapbook.com alone, I have over 30 GB!

I know those feelings so very well. I've stopped collecting most script font freebies because there are just so many and they often end up looking the same, so I only collect ones that really stand out to me (and are legible; some suffer the problem that the script is too swirly, too playful, etc. and isn't really readable anymore).

I recently sorted my brushes, but I don't use a manager for them. I actually made preview files by taking screenshots of the brush palette and them grouping them into images by type, and then the brush collections are sorted by type as well. I keep subfolders of the previews, and when I want a specific type of brush I flip through the previews just in Windows Photo Viewer until I find one I want, note the file name, and load that brush set. It's worked fine so far.

That is a great tip Amanda, I love the idea of creating previews for my brushes.

As for the fonts: I had the same problem. Hoarded way too many fonts. I decided to buy a big font bundle for my CU designs and am basically only using those now. I took a deep breath and deleted my entire PU folder a couple of years ago. Now I only load the CU fonts I actually use and when I need a specific font, I’ll download one. Or sometimes two or three... But I try to be hard on myself and not download any more fonts that I know I won’t use anyway. Having to sort through all those fonts and not use them in the end is frustrating and I ended up losing too much precious design time. So now I really try to control my hoarding and stay away from website with all those yummy previews...

I had hundreds installed then I dumped them in another folder.... and am but a baby looking at the numbers tossd here ... I never really got into the script fonts thus far ( I have about 30 all full CU) the swirls are just too much for me smiley but it doesn't matter what sort of fonts are too much smiley .... always looking for the big families that have sans, serif and possibly a script. What are your go to fonts? Mine are Helvetica, Lato, Bookman, Bebas, Droid and Lora, Yellowtail, Big Blue, Gineva and Lemon Squeeze. Wilhelmina, Kapra and Southern Aire for tougher and retro stuff .
Amanda: great idea with the previews! I have abr mate but do not use it much.

I am so unorganized. I have mine all in one folder and that is what takes me the longest in anything I make. Choosing the font. I will find a couple I love and use them until I get brave enough to tackle the rest of them again.... then I will use what I pick for a while and then repeat over and over. I start out trying to be organized with everything but that does not ever last very long. I do not know if it is just me being too impatient or too lazy to mess with it. BUT I sure do make it hard on myself. I guess I will go until I have to get a new computer again and then upload all my stuff on a flash drive and then start all over again. It is never ending. I feel ya girl.... smiley

I tried typekits here, would love some feedback. Have you played with them? I just leave the fonts be and take a kit that should work, these dl for 180 days to your fonts in a CC scenario. Wonderful world of typekits... is a bit like pixelscrapper.... instead of sorting all the supplies I tend to rely on PS's search engine and find supplies here instead of finding them on my PC.
These lil wordstrips are something that I use a lot .... always scared I might drown the pics...
This is in the freebie forum.
"There have been some interesting convoes about fonts to the point that I felt I needed to make these. Free thru Feb 16th 2020."

These are great and will be a huge help. TY❤

smiley

I use a program called NexusFont. I have thousands of fonts so I really needed help to keep them organized.

Lots of wonderful suggestions here.

I have my fonts in separate subfolders by category with commercial use ones in a sepaprate folder.)

I'm trying out NexusFont. Currently I have my fonts in separate subfolders by category with commercial use ones in a separate folder.)

I love fonts. My favorite is Goudy Oldstyle, with Garamond a close second.

It's possible to upload, sort and store you fonts here: https://www.creativefabrica.com/fontcloud/ref/186

I would be careful moving your fonts around too as some will be needed by your computer system, you might find your browser font looks different next time you open it! I find the best way to sort is to use a program like Font Book (for macs but there are plenty of free ones for Windows systems) open it up and take a look at the full font and if still like it AND if you have used in the past 6-12 months. If not disable it, then check again on it in a few weeks then dump.

I have WAY more fonts than will fit in FontCloud; I've been collecting for literally 20 years.

I'm using FontBase for font management, only installing the ones I'm using for the particular kit I'm designing at the time. While the base program is free, they do have a subscription that only costs $30 a year to unlock some higher-end features that I find really useful for creating beautiful word art, and I'm happy to pay that because it's worth it to me.

Also, I see you don't have many community points yet; welcome to DigitalScrapbook.com, Ben!

@Holly I switched over to FontBase when Nexus Font started freezing more often than actually working, and I really like it. It's much prettier than the drab Windows 95 look of NF but I only really utilise it for sorting and activating fonts. I've been contemplating trying the subscription. I'm curious how the extra features help with word art?

Being able to see all the glyphs in a font, especially a script with extra variations of letters, without having to jump over to a third program, is a big thing when I'm trying to work some swashy letters around each other or find just the right flourish to fill in a corner that seems a little empty. Being able to click that glyph and copy it to then paste right into my text layer in Photoshop (or any other program that doesn't have a Glyphs panel built into it like Illustrator does) is a HUGE time-saver. To me, that alone is worth the $30 a year as it saves me at least an hour a week; it'd be worth it even if it only saved me an hour a month. The option to auto-activate missing fonts in Adobe apps is nice, but not as much of a big deal for me since I don't have a CC subscription.

Hello and thanks!

If anyone is feeling really adventurous and wanted to edit a font you can always load it up with FontForge, amazing free program to edit fonts with!

https://fontforge.org/en-US/

@Trish, I don't know if NexusFont freezing for you is the same issue I had where it just took infinity years (or felt like it) to scan folders in, but I found disabling the Windows Font Caching Service (as recommended when I googled the problem) fixed that part.

I do know that NexusFont has a CharMap option when you right-click a font that will show you the characters in most fonts and let you select and copy them from there if needed. The only ones I've found it doesn't work for are those that utilized OpenType font features to basically map alternate characters to the same glyph or something. I had one font like that, where I had to open it in Illustrator in order to access the alternate glyphs just due to how the font worked and the fact that Photoshop 5.5 didn't have the necessary feature to access them, nor could NexusFont see them (limitations of a free program, I guess).

Regarding any Font problems, you could try and use my suggestion of fontforge, open it and re-save it. This seems to help with any issues I have had. I would be happy to do this for you or anyone having problems with Nexus or any other font thats being problematic.

Just a reminder, folks--keep multiple backups and test them regularly! I had about half my fonts get wiped while trying to uninstall a problematic program, then discovered my backup drive has failed...but I'm still able to recover from an offsite backup held by a trusted friend. It's a few months old, but nowhere near losing half of a 20-year collection.

So - a fontbase question - with the free version, can you tag fonts like you can in Nexus Font? Or how do you use it to organize your fonts? And does fontbase work with fonts stored on an external hard drive?

FontBase works on the concept of "collections" where you add fonts to one or more groups. Kind of the reverse of tagging the font file, if I'm making sense? Instead of a font having potentially many tags, it can belong to many collections. Similar result, just going the other direction. More like Suitcase, if you ever worked with that font manager.

I've got my fonts stored on an internal drive, and only use the external for backup, so I can't answer the external drive question. You can have it set up to use font folders on any drive connected to your computer, but I haven't tested how it responds if your font folder is on a drive which gets unplugged and reconnected regularly.

Thanks Holly - Fontbase seems to work ok with external hard drives, and the collections makes sense. One more feature I can't seem to find though - can you easily change the preview text? I found how to change it for individual fonts, but in nexusfont I could just type in my text and see it in all the fonts . . . can you do that in Fontbase too?

Yeah, FontBase supports that--it's along the bottom edge of the window. Just click the line and type in something new, then hit enter, and it'll use that word or sentence as your preview. (I find that an invaluable tool for finding just the right fonts for a piece of word art!)

That's bizarre - when I tried that earlier, it only changed one font for me, not all of them. Now it's working right. Thank you!!

Being able to change the preview text for all the fonts at once is a must-have for any font organizing site or program, to be honest. I want to know how my text will look without having to actually re-type it repeatedly (as we used to have to do in the Dark Ages of computers smiley ).

Some good font info here. Thanks for sharing those sites. I'll need to check them out.

Hi Fontlovers,

here I have a recommendation for new fonts for you from DAFONT

"Oakmint" has the letter O(h) at the beginning, not a D smiley

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