Hi gang, I don't know about everyone else but when choosing a font for a project, I get tired of picking a font typing a letter, then saying "oh no that's not good..." and then choosing another, typing another letter just to see that it is not the right one either, and on and on and on, until I get one that I like or just say what the heck I'm tired of looking and deleting and looking and deleting, and just pick one for the project. Now I said all that to say is there a way to see the frigging fonts not just the names of the things in photoshop, or what is everyone else doing!!!!! HELP!!

one wasy is to use Adobe Type Manager (ATM). I'm pretty sure it's a free download. With it, you not only can look at the fonts before hand, but also enable and disable fonts as you need them to speed up yer puter (I dunno bout you, but I once loaded about a thousand fonts at one time just to see what would happen, and it scarred me for life). ATM will show you the fonts in regular, bold, italic, etc.

slynky, is this program only for Postscript type or something, because I downloaded ATM light( the only free one I found) and installed it , I found a dialogue box that said browse for type, so I located my fonts folder, and clicked on it , and nothing happened. what is this program supposed to do. There was nothing to tell you what to do with this program.

Hi mickey...

Most graphic designers I know (including myself) keep a Font Book. This is just a notebook with a print out of each font you have on your machine, and/or on CD.

If you ar not sure how to do this, just let me know what OS you are running, and I will tell you how to do it.

BTW... ATM is for postscript fonts. If you are running windows you should find a folder on your main hard disk called psfonts. ATM will manage everything in that folder.

Cool alpha, I'm using Windows Me need help on that print out, yes that would help a lot. thanks for the How to!!

I haven't actually done this on ME yet, but it should be the same as any other Windows' system.

Start by opening Windows Explorer. Find the windows folder and double click on it. Now locate the fonts folder, and double click on that. You will now see every True Type font installed on your system. Double click on a font, and will open up in the Windows Font Viewer. On the viewer there is a print button, and I am sure you can guess the rest. If you have a lot of fonts this will take some time, but it is well worth the effort when you are deciding on which font to use, or discussing options with a client.

With Postscript fonts you do the same thing. the only difference is the location of the fonts, and with ATM, the viewer window.

Have fun, and if you get stuck... lemme know.

Alpha

Good tip Alpha. I was thinking of those Letraset Font Books they used to have at most graphic/printing stores. No idea if they still have them....all I know is that -unless you specifically need a really special font- most classics are still the way to go. I don't know if companies like Letraset still make these books, but I'm sure it'll be a good thing to either make your own book (like Alpha said) or try to find an old book.

Thanks Alpha, sure appreciate the tip, sometimes its the seemingly simply tips that people really love. We all get so involved in the complicated stuff that we over look the meat and potatoes stuff !! from my family to yours have a great day!!!

Another handy thing is charmap.exe. You can access it (under windows) under th Accessories folder, usually. It allows you to see not only what a font looks like, but also the extended character sets for each font. I always use charmap to choose my fonts.

The technique that works for me is. I type my text , Highlight it, single click in the font box, and then just use the scroll wheel on my mouse to go through all the fonts loaded on my system. Hope this helps. Quinn

well alpha , I tried your suggestion and it worked, but You get a whole page of just that one font in various sizes, then you have to do the entire process for each font, and even I don't have that much time or paper, I was thinking something in the way of just one line for each font, not one full page for each font, I must have 600 fonts or so, so back to the drawing board I guess for us, and kieraw, I couldn't find Charmap.EXE on my system anywhere, I even did a search for it using "FIND", and it turned up nothing ,I am using Windows ME everyone , I don't no if I mentioned that. Oh and Quinn, I tried your suggestion and It doesn't work in Photoshop 6 I highlighted the type and scrolled with the mouse, nothing. But if I clicked on the type name it did change the type to that particular font but Thats kinda what I am doin now and it takes too long to click on each font, and I kinda forget what each one was after a while, I'd just like to compare them to each other before I choose. Well guys if anyone has anymore suggestions I am open for help. (something Free would be better naturally, maybe freeware or something) I have faith that someone will have the answer thanks loads!!!!

Attached Link: http://www.nonags.com

Sorry mickey... I knew that each font prints a full page, and should have mentioned it. I did just take a quick to nonags.com, and they have about twenty different font viewers/managers that are freeware. The link above will take you to their main page. Click on the Software free access link then select a download site near you on the next screen. On the next page you will see an area called download categories look for Text then under that is Fonts & Tools. That is where I found them. If you get one you really like, please let us know how it works. BTW... I have used nonags for years, and gotten some really nice apps there.

If you use Thumbs Plus as a thumbnail maker/viewer/image database, it will do thumbnails of fonts as well, both True Type and Postscript. The thumbnail will show the name of the font, written in that font, and double-clicking on the thumbnail will bring up a full-page whole-alphabet preview. Evaluation copies are available at www.cerious.com; if you haven't ried it, you should. I should mention that I have no connection to the company; I just like the program!

Well guys and gals I found a nice little font viewer, call Fontselector, by Peter Theill,(freeware)it can be downloaded at http://www.theill.com/fs I have not as of yet been able to make it print out but for viewing it is great.It locates it self in program files and upon clicking on the EXE file it places a small icon in your windows tool bar, click on the icon and you're in business!

If you happen to have CorelDraw 8, it came with Bitstream Font Navigator. You can view by True Type, PostScript or all formats. You can also view by style: Decorative, Monospaced, Sans Serif, Script, Serif, Symbol or all styles. There is no extra popups to see the actual text (like Adobe Type Manager). The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog is their sample text which can be changed to any text you want. Sample text can be to fit or can specify size. You can select to add fonts or remove fonts (drag and drop). It also scans your drives for all fonts. It shows all the fonts on your computer and shows the fonts that are already installed.

If you happen to be like me, I have the maximum allowable number of fonts or very near maximum. Printing them out would take forever.

btw, Emigre makes some DAMN nice fonts... expensive though

Follow Quinn's suggestion, but press ctrl+h (isn't it option+h on macs?) to hide extras, and you won't have that annoying inverted block obscuring your layout (or your text).

Attached Link: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~scef/tft.html

Hi. Maybe you can find this freeware tool useful too. It is called The Font Thing and let you browse installed and uninstalled true type fonts. You can also organize them in sub folder and preview words or single characters in colours.