Font List panel

The font list is one of the most important panels as it shows the list of fonts based on the selected view or group. When the Active view is selected, it will show all active fonts. Active fonts are either installed or loaded, thus available to all applications.

 

 

The first toolbar button (the eye) at the top of the font list panel allows you to toggle font preview. Font preview shows the preview text in the “Preview” column while using the actual font. This way you can scroll though the list of fonts and see an instant preview. The toolbar also contains a Preview Text combo box through which you can change the text shown in the Preview column. You can type your own text directly inside this combo box or select a predefined one. You can further customize the Preview Text through the Options window. Next to it is a font size combo box which allows you to change the size of the text inside the Preview column. The other buttons are related to categorization and family grouping.

 

Categorization and family grouping

With categorization and family grouping (the last toolbar buttons) your long list of fonts will be changed into groups. To choose the category, do click the triangle on the right side of the categorization toolbar button. You can then choose between:

•Embedding

•Font Type

•Foundry

•Rating

•Weight Class

•Width Class

With family grouping, all fonts within the same font family will be grouped together.

 

Columns

By default, MainType displays thirteen columns in the fonts panel, but there are many more. If you right-click on any column header you can change the visibility of the columns and restore them to their original size. If the name of a column is checked, it will appear in the panel. You can change the width of each column by left clicking on the vertical bars between each column and dragging it either left or right. To change the order of the columns left click on the column header and drag it to the left or right. Left-click on any column to sort the fonts.

 

These are all available columns:

State, Preview, Full Font Name, Family, Style, Type, Regular, Italic, Symbol, Mono, Embedding, Glyphs, Characters, Kerning, Features, Classification, Sample Text, Weight, Width, Version, Foundry, Rating, Note, Tags, Grouped, Date Created, Date Modified, Date Added, and File Size.

 

Font State

The status of each font is represented by a colored ball in the “State” column.

Do read the topic about Install, Load, and Uninstall for a more detailed explanation about the differences between loaded and installed fonts.

 

Sample Text

This is an optional naming field inside fonts and not found in most fonts. Font designers use a font editor like FontCreator (Font Properties, Extended, Sample text) to add naming fields.

 

Font List Settings

To change font list related settings, select Options from the Tools menu and then click the Font Lists tab. among other things, it allows you to show the preview of fonts in red when the font is missing any of the characters needed for the preview text. This powerful feature quickly tells you which fonts lack characters you require.

 

In the Options Dialog, on the Font Lists tab, you can enable/disable the preview of fonts in red when the font is missing any of the characters needed for the preview text. This helps find only fonts that contain the characters you need for a specific project.

 

Font Size and Zoom

The mouse wheel can be used to zoom in or out when the CTRL key is pressed. If you also press the SHIFT key, the cell size won’t change, but the character size will change. To rest to the default sizes, select Reset Font Sizes from the View menu.

Select Multiple Fonts

To select multiple fonts do one of the following:

•To select consecutive fonts, click the first font, press and hold down SHIFT, and then click the last font.

•To select nonconsecutive fonts, press and hold down CTRL, and then click each font.

•To select all the fonts in the list, on the Edit menu, click Select All.

Tags

To add tags to your fonts, you can either right-click the selected fonts, or use the Tags panel. You can then use the Tag Search panel to only view fonts based on the tags.

 

Note: To prevent your system from running out of resources, the 32 bit edition of MainType will show at most 50000 fonts at once in the font list . MainType can easily manage many more fonts, so if your font library contains more than 50000 fonts, do consider tags, views, ratings, or groups to browse subsets of your collection, or install and use the 64 bit edition of MainType as that edition doesn’t have this limitation. Open the about box to see what edition you use.