Tagging and cataloging PDF type specimens

andyvanvoorden

I have a large collection of digital type specimens in PDF and the occasional screenshots. Fonts I find interesting, fonts I want to use or purchase in the future — like the Japanese tsundoku or piling books without reading, but with fonts. I’m looking for a way to classify these documents. 

So, if in the future I need, for example, a font with some Art Nouveau characteristics for display titles, or a sans text typeface with small caps (of which there are fewer these days), I can easily find it. I even have a category with ‘peculiar shapes/traits’ for striking titles on book covers.  

I don’t want to install trial fonts and tag them in a font management app. Just to keep the fonts I bought or use separate from these other fonts. The advantage of using PDFs is that you can see ‘what the atmosphere is’, see what these fonts offer under the hood without collecting the actual font files. 

How would you approach this? 

Duplicating everything into folders is madness, of course. I’m thinking of marking the files directly within the MacOS ecosystem using different tags. Or would you tag them with keywords in Bridge and store the information as metadata? Actually, I don’t use Bridge much that often, except for occasional management of large collections of photos or other documents in my book design process.

Feel free to shine your light on this or point me in the right direction. 

With kind regards from Ghent.

Matthew Smith

If you have all of your reference material gathered in one place, you may be interested in a tool such as Eagle to tag/catalog all of your files.

Mark Simonson

I’ve tried using Finder tags to organize scans of sketches, but it got unwieldy very quickly.

It seems like Finder tags were only meant for very high-level tagging (e.g., “work,” “personal,” “in progress,” etc.), not for tracking lots of specific things, like typefaces. I tried using Finder comments, which works, and are searchable. But, ironically, are not supported in iCloud. (The reason, as I understand it, is that comments are tracked locally by the Finder, and aren’t part of the file itself, whereas tags are part of the file.)

I ended up using the Photos app, which has a lot of different ways to organize images based on tags and text descriptions. Plus, it’s accessible from all my devices, making it very convenient. Photos is probably not the best for storing and organizing PDFs, though.

(Note: In case it’s not obvious, this is all Apple-based.)

Nick Shinn

You could just duplicate each PDF and keep it in multiple folders, as appropriate. 
That would have the advantage of not depending on 3rd party apps, which can become obsolete, disappear, require repeated updating or subscription fees. 

Nick Shinn

Duplicating everything into folders is madness, of course.

Why? The files are relatively small.
All the PDFs in a particular folder can be opened at the same time (in Acrobat) and their tabs quickly browsed through to show the first page. Acrobat also has a variety of organizational tools.

Andreas Stötzner

A bullet-proof method of organizing your informations would be to rely on a specific folder structure and on a file name nomenclature, entirely. Because these settings can not get lost, practically.

You could a) build an archive of folders according to provinciality (foundries) or according to pertinence (sans, roman,…).

For file names you could b) establish a signature/code system in which every aspect you may want to search for is represented by a crisp code, e.g. SC for small caps or W5 for five weights. How much such codes you deploy is just your own choice. These codes work like searchable tags, because they are short they can be inserted in the file names.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_retrieval

John Butler

You should be able to use symbolic links or shortcuts instead of duplicating files. Though I’ve not tested if or how that affects auto-preview in Explorer or Finder.

John Nolan

Perhaps I misunderstand. Would a database or spreadsheet, with links to your pdfs, work?

Thomas Phinney

The problem with just using physical directory structure is that you can’t do any even slightly more complex searches: something with properties “a” AND “b” or the like.

andyvanvoorden

Thanks for the replies. 

Most of that information lives rent free in my mind, but I want to put that information on my computer, to make future projects for branding or book designations bit easier.

Andreas Stötzner said:

A bullet-proof method of organizing your informations would be to rely on a specific folder structure and on a file name nomenclature, entirely. Because these settings can not get lost, practically.

You could a) build an archive of folders according to provinciality (foundries) or according to pertinence (sans, roman,…).

True... Tagging is not fool-proof. 

Maybe in this view it is better to use Bridge and save that information as keywords or actual metadata.

If your classification is more simple, duplicating files would be indeed useful. In my workflow it would be easier to sort based on characteristics or practical use.


For example 'smallcaps' (for extended academic foot/endnotes), ‘news’ (short extenders in editorial text), ‘compressed’ (for long words in booktitles or information in tables), 'duplex' (for grading digital print/offset) or just esthetics like 'technical', 'geometric' etc. 

Thomas Phinney said:

The problem with just using physical directory structure is that you can’t do any even slightly more complex searches: something with properties “a” AND “b” or the like.

Exactly... Sometimes you need to combine those characteristics. Browsing through dozens folders to cross check the duplicated specimens, would take more time than just filtering based on tags.

I'll update here when I find a solution...