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All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.
-Gaston Bachelard

Notes from Notchcode


11.17.2005

Fonts, Fonts, Everywhere

Well, I just spent the last two hours culling duplicate, corrupt, and unwanted fonts from my Mac, and let me tell you: there's a reason I've been putting it off for so long. I had over 750 separate font files, comprising over 200 distinct typeface families, sitting around. It's by far NOT the largest font library around, even within a two-mile radius, I'm guessing; but it nearly brought my little first-generation TiBook to its knees.

Apple has its FontBook application for managing fonts, which comes as part of the operating system. I use the term "managing" loosely here, as it is nowhere near as powerful as the old Adobe Type Manager Deluxe was on the Classic pre OSX platform. But it's what I have, and I haven't had time to find a decent font-management tool, yet. But others have, and I will be reviewing them here, at some point as well. I ended up finding every single font file on my Mac, spread over six different locations, and plopped them into one directory so I could see what I had. Oh, and there was one file in there that kept quitting my OS everytime I saw it being listed in my Finder window...argh. Eventually I got them separated into usable but unused, often-used, system-necessary, and plain junkable categories.

I ended the evening by archiving about 50 font families that I haven't touched in over three years...I'll break them out of mothballs if I really need to, but I suspect they're in cold storage for good. I still have a fair number of active typefaces: over 130 faces made up of almost 500 distinct variations...should be good enough for most projects; and hey, if nothing fits the bill--well, I love having an excuse to go buy more typefaces!

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