Font Catalog

Back when I started with computers—wow, that was a long time ago—I had applications that would allow me to print a catalog of all my fonts. These print-outs served as the basis of my font library that I could choose from when creating banners, cards, newsletters or anything else that required text. So, how do I do this today? Well, for me Font Book, that applications the comes on every Mac, is good enough. There are other font management utilities out there, but for my relatively small collection of 252 fonts, Font Book does the trick.

What I do is open Font Book, found in the Applications folder, and click on All Fonts, then press CMD-A to highlight every font. I then press CMD-P to print. When the print dialog box comes up, I choose the PDF button and the Save as PDF option. If I were to print to paper, 252 fonts would consume 140 pages.  Once I have saved the print out to PDF, I can come back to that PDF file at any time and scan through the pages for styles of fonts I may want to use on my next project. Of course, if I want to present a font collection to a client to allow them to choose which font to use for a project or maybe just to my kids I can always print the PDF to the printer. Also, I can always just scan through the fonts in Font Book since it too provides a sample on the right-hand pane, but that is more time consuming because I can only scan one font at a time. If I have a page full of fonts,  I can more quickly scan to the style type I am looking for without having to pause at each and every one.