14 DAY TRIAL // When working with fonts, and by fonts I mean many of them, you need two kinds of programs. The first is a program that excels at locating characters within fonts, and giving you the Unicode, web and UTF code for that character. The second is a program that lets you manage a large font collection and find the font that looks the way you want to. The two are very different in both scope and approach. The Fontz is a program that falls into the second category, and accomplishes its role quite well.
Many ways to view fonts
The Fontz offers many different ways of viewing fonts. You have the choice of a Font Browser, Font Viewer, and Font WYSIWYG List.
The font browser is basically a split screen view, with the list of available fonts on the left, and a preview text on the right. The preview area is fully editable and can be changed in any way desired; bold, italic, underline, size and color can be adjusted on the fly. The only thing the preview area cannot do is let you adjust line and character spacing.
The Font Viewer offers a way of quickly previewing many fonts, listing them one after the other with the designated sample text. Unlike the Browser, here, the only option you can change is the font size.
Last but not least, there is the WYSIWYG List. This is very similar to the viewer, with the one exception that it is static. While in the viewer, you can change the size of the font, this is basically a static text file. The one big advantage is that it can be printed.
Character
Because the aforementioned methods only give a general idea of the font's look, The Fontz offers a method to get in depth with any font via the Font Display window. The display window is similar to the preview display in the Browser, with the exception that it will always revert to the default content when you change a font.
The Display contains all the standard characters of a font that can be obtained by pressing the keys on the keyboard with and without the Sift key, ordered exactly as they are on the keyboard. You can change the style, alignment and colors, and even the content of the window itself while viewing a font, but, whenever you change to another font, the content will revert to the default characters.
The Display window is also tied to the slideshow function which lets you play a slideshow of the fonts, with the delay of your choice. This is a very nice option for passively browsing fonts.
Get organized
The Fontz allows you to set up font collections for easier management of fonts. This is achieved through the groups drawer, which is hidden most of the time. Here you can define groups, and add fonts to them. Furthermore, the program has two ways of displaying these groups within the drawer.
The first is by displaying the font name using the font's characters, the second is by displaying the default sample text using the font's characters. Alternatively, you can opt to dump the content of a group into the Viewer window.
The program is also good at letting you work with fonts that are not currently installed on the computer. Just point it towards a folder that contains fonts and it will load them up and you can interact with them exactly in the same manner as with the installed fonts. This is great for letting you filter through large collections of fonts and picking out the ones you want.
Many things to say Many similar programs have 'font favorites', letting you basically create a group in which to keep your preferred fonts. The Fontz does this much better, but also give you favorites, the difference is that in The Fontz favorites don't apply to fonts but, rather, to sample texts.
This lets you keep many different text captions which you can quickly switch between to see how the fonts would look. This is especially handy because you can have different captions for headlines and body text, and even different ones depending on the type of text you were dealing with.
The Good Prety much everything is well thought and laid out. Each window and option served a very specific function and they all complement each other nicely.
The Bad The excessive use of the word Fontz everywhere is a bit annoying and cuts down on the professionalism impact of the program. Also, the option to change character and line spacing would be a great addition.
The Truth A very good tool for those working in DTP. Has pretty much everything you need to manage a large collection of fonts.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
