7.8.13

Purple Frog Recommends - Nexus Font Manager


Are you a designer or someone who often works with fonts? Let me recommend you this font manager.
I don't know why it took me 8 years of working with graphic design to finally think: hey, I wonder if there’s an easier way of doing this. So I went digging and it has made my font related work so much faster and simpler! I have even been varying more on my choice of fonts just because I can really see what they look like, which you cannot do properly on most programs (the font samplers are too small). There are other font managers out there, some are free and some paid for, but Nexus has everything I need so for me it works great. Here is a preview from my computer.


 It has options for installing/uninstalling fonts, and apparently you don’t even need to have all those fonts installed in your computer. The site says: “while nexusfont is running, all listed fonts in NexusFont are available on other programs. Don't slow down your system by keeping hundreds of fonts installed to it”. But I don’t really use those features, what I found really useful is the tagging system. I’m a big fan of tags, since they let you organize your stuff with more than one category (as opposed to sets or files where the category is the name of the set). So for example I can have a single font tagged as “decorative,hand,slim,script” instead of just having it inside a set called “decorative” or “hand”.
Granted, it took me a whole week to organize all my fonts into the categories I created, but it was worth it! I even created a little “method” which I’m going to describe here, since someone out there might find it useful (hopefully…).

First I made 2 sets of fonts – “text” and “not text” (just a silly name to describe all the more decorative, not suitable for long reading fonts. I use these most in my work).
Then I went on to writing down all the categories I wanted to classify my “not text” fonts into. They are: angled, blackletter, bold, boxy, brushed, calligraphic, comic, cute, decorative, dingbat, distressed, fun, geometric, hand, languages, almost text, rounded, script and slim. I copied all this tags and pasted them to all my “not text” fonts, so when I organized them I was removing tags rather than adding them (I did this also because there was no way to quickly add tags just by clicking on them, you have to type them manually. Maybe something for the developers to add to a next version). I also added a tag called “uncategorized” to all the fonts, so I could stop at any time and continue the next day by turning on the filter for the “uncategorized” tag – so the program only showed those.   
Next began the long process of looking at each font and deciding which tags it belonged to (or not). This was a little boring but well, it was done once and the time I save on choosing fonts now has paid off. I just have to remember to tag the new fonts when I get them. Here’s a look at what it looks like when I turn on the filter for “distressed”.



Another nice feature is the copyright and url info that appears when you select a font (bottom left corner). This makes it super easy to check if a font has commercial use allowed.
One thing worries me though, when I tried to import the Nexus settings from my pc into the laptop I didn´t manage… it says in the readme file: “NexusFont can be run in USB memory with font files in it. Even if the drive letter is changed, all library information will be maintained”. Maybe I just need to get the hang of it. Will add it here if I figure it out.
I should also say that I was not asked or endorsed to review this program, I just enjoyed it and wanted to share.  
Thanks for reading, see you next time!

8 comments:

  1. Interesting review. I've been using the program too, but I haven't managed to get my fonts organised. Your procedure is very clever - I'll have to try it!

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    1. Thank you! I´m glad you found it interesting! =)

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  2. Eii, que dica boa! Valeu muito! Vou testar! :))

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    1. Eba! Veja lá se vc gosta! =) Mesmo sem organizar tudo com tags, só a visualização em tamanho maior já ajuda bastante!

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  3. Thank you for sharing your "little method." It's quite useful!

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  4. Thanks for your review and the information on how you use this program. I am considering switching from my current font manager which only handles True Type fonts to one that handles other types as well. NexusFont looks like it could be a good fit for the capabilities that I would like to have in a font manager. Your method for using tags was informative. Unfortunately what you said about how it works lowers my esteem of the program a little.
    Here are some of the other cons that I find with the program.
    1- While the capability to have multiple lines of sample text is a plus, the lack of the capability to have multiple sample texts and to be able to store them within the program definitely, at least for me, is a larger offsetting minus.
    2- Having a line of text worth of white space above and below the sample text is, for me, a waste of space. I would much prefer to be able to see the additional fonts that could be displayed if the white space were reduced or eliminated.
    3- The help documentation is not well written. Perhaps it is written better in the native language of the author but the English language version leaves much to be desired.
    4- The help documentation does not provide the explanation that I was hoping it would provide relating to why one would choose to use sets versus tags to categorize fonts. The intent of the groups and folders seems to overlap sets and tags as well. So a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each would be nice. It seems that one of the intents of the groups and folders feature is to allow font files to be stored in locations other than the system font folder, but that is not clearly stated.
    5- By doing some experimentation with the sets feature I discovered that a font can be included in multiple sets, this information is not included in the help.
    6- The help appears to imply that multiple tags can be selected to filter the fonts displayed, but it does not explicitly indicate that this can be done. If it can be done the tags feature may provide more versatility for organizing fonts than the sets feature. I have not done any experimentation to determine if multiple tags can be used to filter the fonts displayed.

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    1. Hello Jay, thanks for your input!
      About the last topic you wrote about, it is possible to filter the fonts with more than one tag, but it shows all the fonts with either tag, rather then the intersection of both tags. Would be nice to have the option.

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