Blake Perdue - Website & app reviews, and technology & startup commentary
App Review: Font Explorer X
Over the years I’ve built up a large collection of fonts. Having alot of fonts installed at one time can be a serious pain. Apps take longer to load and it makes choosing a font a time-consuming process. In comes Linotype Font Explorer X, a font management, selection and discovery tool for both OS X and Windows.
Font Management
Once installed, Font Explorer X imports all your fonts and allows you to easily manage them. You can create font sets and activate and deactivate font sets. A font set is simply a collection of fonts. You can use font sets to organize your fonts by type (serif, sans-serif) by project (xxx website, yyy brochure) or by preference (favorites, less-used).
When you’re working on a project, you can create a project font set and then activate it and the fonts are immediately available in all your apps. When you’re done, just deactivate the font set an you no longer see those fonts in your apps.
Just like activating and deactivating sets, you can also activate/deactivate individual fonts. I went through my scaled-down collection and deactivated 284 of 647 fonts, most of which were fonts I rarely or never use. Deactivating these fonts led to decreased load times in Photoshop and Illustrator.
Font Selection
Font Explorer X allows you to preview how text renders in different fonts at the same time. You enter some text and choose the various fonts to compare, thus making it easy to find just the right font you are looking for.
Font Discovery
But what if you can’t find that perfect font? Well, Linotype, a huge font foundry, has tightly integrated their font store, allowing you to browse and purchase fonts inside the app.
Say you download a cool company brochure and you’d like to know what fonts they used. Font Explorer X’s “detect fonts in documents” feature will tell you. You can use it to discover the fonts used in rtf, eps, pdf, pages, key, and indd files.
While I like the discovery features of Font Explorer X, they have overlooked one important way to find fonts: scanning images. MyFonts has a great page where you can upload an image (or provide an image URL) and they will scan the image and tell you want fonts are in it. I frequently use this when I come across a webpage that has a cool font I’d like to buy.
The Verdict 
Font Explorer X has made my design life much better. My apps are faster and I can easily manage and select fonts. As I mentioned above, I would really like to see an image scanner added to font discovery. Other than that, I have no complaints about this app and have really enjoyed using it. 4 out of 5 stars.
What do you use to manage your font collection?
Comments
I love Font Explorer. I have no idea how I got along before without it. I thought that I knew the ins and outs of the program, but you pointed out a new feature to me, the font detector.
Smashing Magazine also has a good article about font management tools:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/09/05/25-font-management-tools-reviewed/
as a frequent user of multiple fonts, this seems like an easy and uncomplicated way to keep all my fonts in order.
This is really handy. One of my biggest hassles is switching between different fonts, especially when copying and pasting from multiple sources with different fonts (for instance, when copying sources online for a research paper.) With font explorer, that will no longer be an issue
This looks really cool. There are a lot of times where I’m on the web and want to know what font was used to make a specific site. Plus it looks like a good way to keep your font’s in order.
This seems like an easy and uncomplicated way to keep all my fonts with order. I may use for my font alignment work.
For someone who values choice and simplicity in working with fonts, this program will definitely be helpful. I hate having to scan down a list to find a font I want; this program will help make font selection so much easier.
This is just what I need to organize my fonts! I really like the comparison feature – that would be fabulous for those times I can’t quite decide which one would be better for a particular application. Plus, being a bit of a font junkie, I like the font detector.
I am wondering why I never knew about this before, what an awesum idea, this will make my daily life a lot easier as in my line of work I use many different fonts for different programs, It will also help me keep my fonts in one place and in order.
Eh. I’ve used this app on some friends’ Apple computers, but it’s oddly glitchy in Windows, probably because of how the OS manages fonts. I find myself adding prefixes to font filenames just as this app categorizes them and manually moving them in and out of the fonts folder as needed; add in a set of batch files to do that for me, and I think I’ve got all I need.
Too bad it’s no longer free. A good way to buy Linotype fonts, but is it worth buying?
@Stalwart – No, I don’t think it’s worth buying unless you have a large number of fonts to manage. I used this program pretty intensely when I first got it but haven’t really utilized it recently.
Very classy
I’m so glad I found this site…Keep up the good work
Hey good stuff…keep up the good work! 
I’m so glad I found this site…Keep up the good work I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say GREAT blog. Thanks,
A definite great read…
- Bill Bartmann
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This will definitely be helpful for people who use different fonts in their daily work. I specially liked the detect fonts in document feature. I at times come across cool images on the web and want to know what font was used to create it.