How do I best organise my fonts in Fontbook?

You may have read in some obscure blog posting that it is good to organise your fonts in Collections in Fontbook. That obscure posting was right, but what strategy should you use to create collections? Which criteria should you use?

You should of course create one or a few folders with your favourite fonts, based entirely on what you like.

In addition, it may be good to create folders based on some objective criteria, and to do so, you can often use the search field.

You can for example start with a search for fonts that contain Italic typefaces.

1. Create a collection called "Italics".
2. Type "Italic" in the search field. The font list now only contains fonts which match the word Italic.

3. Select all fonts with command-A.

4. Clear the search field. The selection now extends to all typefaces in the fonts that contain italics.

5. Drag the selection to the collection "Italics".

You now have a collection with fonts that you can italicize ready to be used in Pages or TextEdit or any other application using the Font Palette.

But you can go on.

6. Create another collection called "Italics Slimbach".
7. Click on the Italics collection and type "slimbach" in the search field and repeat the steps above.

You now have a selection with fonts by the designer Robert Slimbach, which all contain Italic typefaces.

And on again.

8. Go through the steps above again, but this time use the search word "Russian".

And you have a collection of Slimbach's fonts that can be used in Russian with Italics.

You can go on like this and create collections with more and more detailed criteria in different areas. You can for example search for "Apple" or "Adobe" to find fonts from those companies. Or you can search for OpenType or Postscript.

There are, however, two things that seem impossible to search for reliably: non-proportional fonts and sans serif fonts.

If you need that you need to create the collections manually. But there are still quite a lot of different kinds of collections you can create using the search function.