Font Organizers, or, why I cried when Fontcase died

Mark Davis

I’ll bet we all have tons of fonts. What programs do you guys use to organize them all?
My weapon of choice has always been Fontcase, which was axed last year. I still use the last release they rolled out—it’s buggy—but I’ve always thought it was well visually organized and well featured. Its predecessor, “Fonts” has poor reviews on the app store, and I’ve heard it’s basically a replication of the Font Book application with a better interface, and not designed for large font libraries in mind.



The final release they made was still crashy, buggy, and is now unsupported by Bohemian Coding. I’m wondering what font organizers you guys use, if there are ones I haven’t heard of yet that are worth trying out! I liked how Fontcase had multiple font previews for Display, Body, and of its Glyphs, and you could change the previewed fonts’ point size with Multitouch gestures. Anything like that out there?

I might be missing the value of more “commercial” font organizers, I’ve been basing my choices on interface and design.

George Thomas

I have used Suitcase since the late 80s and have always been extremely happy with it. I tried one or two others from time to time but they never impressed me enough to switch.

Jacques Le Bailly

I still use the free Linotype FontExplorer X, from way back in the 2000's. Still works on Mavericks.

Jack Jennings

Probably not a particularly popular option, but I've been managing everything by hand, curating a very limited library of families (currently ~100).

At some point a few years ago I just gave up, uninstalled all of the fonts (besides system) by moving them into a different folder. I've moved back the ones that I use often (or the ones that I found myself missing), and the rest stay out. So far this has worked pretty well for me, and I spend a lot less time looking through a cascade of fonts, and I feel like I understand the type that I do use better than I did before.

I've used a bunch of software and never liked any of it. Everything was either ugly, cluttered, buggy, made a mess of my font folder, or all of the above. I agree that the first version of Fontcase was much better than the recent releases, but it crashed too much to be usable, which was disappointing after I shelled out for it. FontExplorer was OK, but after it switched to a paid model I stopped using it and didn't miss it.

[Deleted User]

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Radrad Co

I've used FontCase as well but I found it just didn't suit the way I work. I'm sorry to hear about them ceasing support

I've been using Linotype FontExplorer X (paid version) I find it's useful enough for me and the way my brain works in sorting out my fonts. What I love about the program is its ability to integrate well with the Adobe CC suite and hence removes the hassle of having to remember what typefaces I have used on a certain project and just allows me to activate all the fonts.

Also there's a preview function whereby you can see how a particular typeface would look on a webpage. try it out!

Mark Davis

These all look like excellent alternatives to Fontcase, I just wish they would try to push the envelope with their interfaces. I thought Fontcase nailed that, along with Mac OS gestures to interact with previews.

When you guys compare the features and interfaces of Fontcase and FontExplorer X, is it like comparing Garageband to ProTools, or iMovie to Adobe Premiere Pro? Pretty interfaces, modest features but an easy learning curve, compared to expert level control?

Stephen Coles

Mark, you’ll have no trouble using FontExplorer X. Nothing very complex to learn. I’ve relied on it for nearly a decade (for reasons similar to Double Rad’s) and haven’t been too disappointed.