Managing and Selecting Fonts

In most applications, choosing a font is difficult because you have to choose a font from a single list of all the fonts on your computer.

A new Mac, with no additional software installed on it, has over seventy fonts. A Mac with the dominant office suite and the dominant imaging suite installed has over two hundred fonts. Typically, all those fonts appear in a giant popup menu, even though Apple’s Human Interface guidelines recommend putting no more than twelve items in a popup menu.

Apple provides the terrific Font Book utility, which allows you to group fonts into collections. Unfortunately, the default collections are not very sensible and many people never get around to categorizing their fonts properly.

Pagehand tries to make font selection easier in two ways.

First, Pagehand goes beyond Apple’s font collections by examining the fonts installed on your Mac and organizing them for you.

Second, instead of providing one list of all your fonts, Pagehand provides separate controls for choosing a font category, choosing a font family from a category, and choosing a font face from a font family.