14 DAY TRIAL // Management is a word with some history. The term comes from French, while that one came from a Latin expression. I am not going to tell you stories about this word's origin, but I have to say a few words about its meanings.
In the beginning, management was about leading and directing an organization or a part of it through the deployment and manipulation of resources. Since early 90's, management became more and more important in the IT industry and also inside our home computers. Just think about a world without file managers or media managers! I know that it can exist, but that would be a slow world. Losing speed means losing time, and time is money.
We are not going to review a file manager or a piece of data manager software today. Most users are happy with the fonts that come with Windows and don't really care much about them. But there are also a lot of designers out there using thousands of fonts and in this case font management can become a problem.
X-Fonter is a program that can solve almost any problem concerning fonts. You may use it to install/uninstall, load/unload, compare and preview all types of fonts. It supports TrueType, OpenType, Postscript Type 1, Raster and Vector font types.
The version I am reviewing now has a free 30 days trial. The good thing is that it has no limitations, so you will be able to decide if you need it or not and save the required money for the purchase in a month, if the answer is positive.
It's time for the joyride now, so fasten your seat belts and get ready to find out what X-Fonter is all about!
The interface is well organized and most things can be done without having to use the menu bar. The X-Fonter main screen is divided into two parts. The left part shows the font selection and the right one takes care of the detailed view for the currently selected font. You can resize these parts as you wish, and also have more than one preview window in order to visually compare two or more fonts at the same time.
In the left panel there are three tabs available. The first one shows the list of fonts currently installed on your machine allowing you to unload or uninstall them. The second tab opens a browser window that enables you to select any folder on your computer and if it has fonts in it, preview and install them. The last tab to be found in the left panel allows you to organize your fonts into separate categories, for better management. Just think about keeping an accurate collection based on categories or having to browse through some thousands fonts to find "that cool one"!
Moving on to the right panel, we have six tabs available to check. The first one is the default font view area.
The Image & Effect Studio is a very cool feature that lets you preview the currently selected font in different conditions. You can put a gradient over the text or as text background or apply shadowing and blurring to the text and background. The results can be copied to the clipboard or saved as a jpg or gif file.
In the next tab all 256 ASCII characters for the currently selected font are shown in a clear grid, while the Char Map Unicode tab shows you the unicode characters supported and how they look. The last two tabs allow you to search for a specific character based on its name and number and to view the information available for the current font, such as its names, status, characteristics, supported code pages and more.
The program toolbar puts other strong features at our disposal. You can create a HTML Font Book, filter the fonts using seven characteristics. Filtering thousands of fonts becomes child's play when you find out that the family, type, style or character set can be used as criterion. If you need to send a pack with your favorite fonts to one of your friends, don't look any further! The solution comes from X-Fonter's Archive Fonts option available from the main toolbar. You can only pack the selected font(s) using ZIP compression, but I guess that's enough when looking up at the feature list.
There are also some other features to be found in X-Fonter, but I am sure that you've already got the idea: try it now!
The Good
From where I'm standing, everything is great with X-Fonter: it supports all fonts, the interface is extremely easy to use at first sight and has a lot of features. Throw into the pot a very good price and you get the recipe for what I can call without any doubt the best font manager that I ever used.
The Bad
A very bad thing is that it doesn't come for free... and while reading through the Help system I found some topics that maybe were not detailed enough.
The Truth
X-Fonter is such a good and useful application that it should have been free... or much higher priced! Don't wait too much, if you waste hours previewing, searching and organizing fonts, grab it as fast as possible!
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
