Since my new yardstick for buying new technology is whether you can put fonts on it correctly, I have been thinking a lot about font management on the Mac, which is, by default, bad. They give you an app called “Font Book” that does enough, I guess.

Designers look further afield because they work with lots of fonts. They may own some of those fonts, or they may be using them as part of a client project. They may want their font menus to be relatively uncluttered, so they turn fonts on & off a lot, usually per project. And individual projects can themselves have lots of fonts, and designers think about projects, not fonts.

Put another way, I think less about (say) Brabo than I think about all of the fonts that Cadence & Slang has, which is (perhaps deceptively?) a lot. When I’m working on C&S, I want to turn all of the C&S fonts on and then start working. Font Book is terrible for this, and so therefore.

For about a decade, I used FontExplorer X to manage my fonts, which was great. Then they got bought by Monotype, because most fonts & font-related stuff tend to get bought by Monotype after enough time. Then it got shut down.

So I looked elsewhere, and I found Typeface. Looks nice, but it isn’t very persistent about making sure the fonts you activated stay active in a way that is actual. And sometimes you think you’re activating a family when in fact you are activating a single weight. And imported fonts have to stay in their original locations, so in practice stuff disappears a lot.

In practice, Typeface is missing a critical feature, which is the option to build its own library of fonts that exists separately from your shared drives & client folders. Font Book does this, as did FontExplorer. Absent that, Typeface needs to be able to track fonts’ new location as they move around your own drives. It does neither.

There are other options. RightFont looks interesting, especially with its ability to detect when fonts are missing as you open apps or files. But most others are either on subscription, have interfaces that date to the precambrian era, or both.

All of these are, of course, Sherlockable. Font Book should be better. In a world where Apple is more concerned about redesigning for its own sake, though, I’m not particularly holding out hope.