Font-management program

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Font management programs are a class of computer utility software that allows the administrator/user of a computer to install, activate or deactivate, delete and generally manage font files on a computer or a computer like device (e.g. mobile phone, settop box).

1 Targeted user groups
2 Features
3 Font handling in different operating systems
4 Commercial font management programs
5 References
6 External Links

[edit] Targeted user groups

Graphic designers, printers/service bureaus and others often need many different typefaces simultaneously to fulfill the needs of designing documents resp. using predesigned documents and graphics. Font management programs offer a number of features that facilitate this creative process. Keeping thousands of fonts active at once can slow down the computer's performance and potentially cause other problems, such as font corruption and instability. These programs can allow users to activate only the fonts they need for any particular project thus offering the use of the needed type faces.

[edit] Features

Typical features of font management programs:

install font files
uninstall font files
activate/deactivate fonts
manage groups of fonts being activated/deactivated together (e.g. for use in defined projects)
find fonts needed for newly opened documents
purchase and install fonts online (e.g. from font manufacturer web sites)
find all installed fonts in a computer system (incl. statistical reports)
check font integrity, basic repair functions
manage fonts installed in a corporate network, check font licensing status
printing of font/typeface samples
on screen display of font previews
supplying information on font properties (character set, contained glyphs, meta information)

[edit] Font handling in different operating systems

The operating systems of Windows PC and Macintosh computers manage fonts, which are always active and available to all programs that use or display text.

Other operating systems (e.g. GNU/Linux) do not generally preload fonts systemwide, but let applications load the fonts themselves, leaving no need for a font-management program. However, current Linux desktop environments like KDE (based on the QT C++ framework) and Gnome (based on the GTK framework) manage fonts for applications using the framework's library calls for font display, thus managing fonts for those desktop environments centrally and comfortably via GUI. Furthermore, current Linux distributions supply a font server program distributing fonts over a network. This font server relies on a locally established font repository in form of disk directories.

For all operating systems there exist many different (and mostly small) applications to handle aspects of font management (installation, activation, crawling) either as freeware or commercial software.