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.

How do I change the shape of the Font palette?

The Font palette or Font panel, that little friendly window that comes up when you press ⌘-T, has a surprising number of possible shapes. Some you can get by simply resizing the window from the lower right corner.

Drag up left:


Drag up right:


Drag down left:


Drag down right:


And then access the wheel menu, where you can show "Preview" and "Effects":

With Preview:


With Preview and Effects buttons:


You can also mix them to some unusual but perhaps useful combinations, like Preview in a really small window.

How do I see what my fonts look like?

From Pages '09, you can see WYSIWYG font previews in the Format Bar font menu. Just make sure that you have the preferences right: Pages > Preferences > Show font preview in Format Bar font menu. To switch between WYSIWYG and standard font names, hold down the alt-key, as you click on the menu.

In previous versions this was not possible, but there were some other options that worked fairly well - some would say better.

Use the Font palette header

Follow these steps:

1. Display the Font palette using ⌘-T or the menu Format > Fonts > Show Fonts.
2. Click on the wheel in the lower left corner and choose "Show Preview".
   

You will get a preview of the currently highlighted font.

To easily scroll between the fonts, first put your cursor in the search field. This will take the focus away from your main document. Then highlight a font and scroll up and down with the arrow keys.

Use the Font palette Favorites


Select the collection "Favorites". It lists the latest font families you used, and it shows them in the last used Typeface and Size.

Use an Apple Script

Follow these steps:

1. In the Finder, go to Applications and open Font Book.
2. In Font Book, highlight all fonts (or the ones you are curious about).
3. In the Finder, go to Applications > AppleScript > Example Scripts > Font Book and double click on Create Font Sample.scpt. It will open in Script Editor.
4. In Script Editor click on "Run".
5. Wait.

After some time, you will have a document in TextEdit that contains samples of all your Typefaces in all your fonts. Save it for future reference.

Use Font Book

Font Book is an important tool for at least two purposes. One - display what your fonts look like. Two - organise your fonts.

The main reason Apple has not included WYSIWYG font displays in Pages or the Font Palette is that it would be next to impossible with all the fonts we have today. You would have to scroll for ever - up and down, looking for a font that fits your needs. You would forget the name of one you saw and you would have to start over again.

WYSIWYG font menus worked on the first Macs, when the average user had no more than six fonts, but today the average user has several hundreds.

If you are serious about finding the most perfect font in this hay stack, use Font Book collections. It does not cost anything, and they are easy to remove, when no longer needed.

Create a collection for for example sans serif fonts, another for good body text fonts, another for Chinese fonts, and so on. It will be much easier to compare Monaco and Andale Mono, if they are in the same small collection, than if you have to scroll 150 fonts to get from one to the other. For more hints how to create collections, check this post.

Which font is that really?

You are writing a text in Pages, where one character is unusual. Let's say you have chosen Party LET as font, and you type the phrase 'In Romanian an apple is called “măr”.' Everything goes fine, until you type the Romanian word măr.



All the characters display fine in Party LET, but the ă looks very different. And yet you can see from the font Palette that it is the same font as the rest of the document. Pages knows that Party LET does not contain the character ă, and therefore uses another font, but which one?

You find the answer by pasting the text into TextEdit. If you highlight the ă in TextEdit and display the Font palette, you can tell that the font used to render the character is Lucida Grande.

Why are some glyphs missing in Pages?

Glyphs are variants of characters in a font. One example is "fi", which in some fonts may use special glyphs to look like "fi". (Increase the text size in your browser, if you cannot tell the difference.) Sometimes glyphs are used to make superscripts like ² instead of 2. Sometimes, but not always, what you achieve with a glyph could also be achieved with standard unicode characters.

In a standard MacOS X application, you access glyph variants like Ligatures and other variants from the Font Palette's Typography option.



Each font can contain a large number of glyph variants or no variants at all. You can see exactly which glyphs are available in a font using the Character Palette.



There are of course different ways of handling glyphs in different kinds of fonts. Adobe and Microsoft use mainly OpenType fonts. Apple uses mainly TrueType fonts. OpenType fonts mostly work in MacOS X, but there may be some glyphs that MacOS X does not support.




For example, if you have Adobe InDesign, you can see a section of "Ornaments" glyphs in the OpenType font Adobe Caslon Pro. The selected pointed hand in the picture above is actually a "P" - something you can tell by copying it and pasting it to another application. You can also see that the unicode for the hand is 0050, and that is upper case P.

You can also see that the GID (Glyph ID) in Adobe's InDesign is 642. However Apple's Character Palette gives it GID 523. Clearly, something strange is going on.

If you access the Typography Palette for Adobe Caslon Pro in TextEdit, you do not have any Ornaments section. However, you can still double click the glyph in the Character Palette and display it in TextEdit.

In Pages you cannot even add it by double clicking it in the Character Palette, when you are running Mac OS X 10.4.

And why? Well, because it is an unsupported feature. It may not be a very exhaustive explanation, but that all there is right now.

How come I cannot use Italics and Bold in some fonts?

The first thing you do is to log feedback, pointing out that you are one of thousands of thousands of users who have problems with this, because Apple does not provide proper feedback in the user interface.

The second thing you do is to read the following paragraphs with an explanation:

Only some fonts contain italic (or oblique) typefaces. A program like MS Word tries to italicize those fonts anyhow, and the result is often not that pretty:



In the picture from Microsoft Word 2004 above, the font Baskerville has an italic typeface. The font Baskerville Old Face does not. The normal versions look almost identical, but the italics look completely different. It is of course possible that you prefer the automatic italics of Baskerville Old Face, but a lot of people probably prefer the elaborate dedicated italics typeface of Baskerville.

To avoid automatically generated italics, Pages and TextEdit and a whole lot of other programs simply do not display italics, when none are available, even if the user asks for it:



In the example using Pages above, the solution is simply to use Baskerville instead of Baskerville Old Face. Here we happened to be lucky, as there was an almost identical font with an italic typeface. It may not be that easy for other fonts, but the Font palette shows which fonts contain Italics.




Comparing the samples from Microsoft Word and Pages higher up on the page, you can also see that Word 2004 is unable to render the ligature fi in any of the samples. Pages handles it well in Baskerville, but fails in Baskerville Old Face, as that font does not contain this feature.