How to Manage Fonts

by David Hakala

You may want to remove unused fonts from your Windows or Mac computer as Tina Gasperson suggested in her Tiplet article, How to Make Windows XP Boot Faster. Or you may want to organize and manage an ever-growing collection of fonts. Either way, here are some tips and tools to manage fonts.

First, the bare-knuckles Windows XP way:

Start > Control Panel > Fonts

Double-click on any font name to open a window of information about it.

On Explorer’s File menu (upper left corner), you can delete a font or install a new font from a CD or a hard drive folder.

Mac users have something similar called Font Book built into OS X. But for both Mac and Windows, there are dozens of third-party font managers to meet the needs of font fanatics and professional graphic artists. Here are just a couple of the most popular ones.

For Mac only, there’s FontExplorer X. The current version is a 30-day trial package, but an older version 1.2.3 is available to use for free indefinitely. What’s cool about FontExplorer is its integration of an online font store. You can explore fonts and play with them as if they were installed on your Mac before buying and downloading them. The tool combines font management, font sorting, font shopping and font discovery in one user-friendly interface. You can organize your fonts using a library, folders, tags and smart sets. That makes it easy to find all typefaces from

For Windows users, I recommend the freeware Font Frenzy because it is safe. If you delete the wrong fonts things like checkboxes, radio buttons, and smiley faces will look weird or won’t work at all. The fonts in dialogue boxes will change to substitutes you may not like. Font Frenzy creates restore points before you start adding and removing fonts, so you can always roll your font collection back to where it started. The DeFrenzy button in one click removes all fonts except those that were present when Windows was first installed. That’s the easiest way to speed up Windows reboots as Tina suggested.

David Hakala has perpetrated technology tutorials since 1988 in addition to committing tech journalism, documentation, Web sites, marketing collateral, and profitable prose in general. His complete rap sheet can be seen at http://www.linkedin.com/in/dhakala