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<h2>Why using a font manager</h2>
<p>This question pops up every now and then. Really, why? Aren't people just
happy with what they've got? Isn't just installing and deinstalling fonts the
usual way good enough? Here are several reasons.</p>
<p>Designers working by contracts are doomed to use a variety of fonts, because
every client is special (well, at least that's what clients like to hear, don't
they?) and has his/her own preferences and ideas about what suits and what
doesn't suit a particular task; because design tasks are actually different.
They really are.</p>
<p>So we are talking here about collections of fonts that are as large as 3.000
fonts. Or 5.000 fonts. Decorative freeware fonts, licensed fonts, very
expensive licensed font families with over 20 faces and so on. Keeping all of them
loaded in the system is likely to slow it down and make browsing through fonts
lists a living hell. Which means you need some tool to activate and deactivate
fonts selectively.</p>
<p>OK, so convinient activation and deactivation. What else? Searching. If you
have over 1K of fonts you might as well want being able to find the font you
need as soon as possible given that usually you have only a basic idea about
what you need. So you want to compare them: type in some text and see how all
candidates render this text, then pick the one that suits the job best.</p>
<p>So, that's it? No. How about grouping some fonts? Think of branding projects.
You create a whole package — website, brochures, business cards
etc. — and use a fixed set of fonts that you worked out after hours
of being shouted at by a highly paid manager in an expensive suite. At any time
you have to be able to quickly enable these fonts in the system to create a new
brochure or a new bunch of business cards for this client (big companies do
reorder them once a month or two). Font managers are here to help you by
providing tagging system.</p>
<p>Now imagine that you work for a font foundry... Okay, okay, you hate these
big companies, they just don't understand the digital age of typography...
yadda-yadda... Whatever. So, your job is to promote fonts that you do. The most
convinient way is to create a so called font book — an album
displaying how same text is rendered using some fonts. You want it now and you
want it quick. Font managers are your friends again: you filter the whole
collection to select just the fonts you want in the font book and in few more
clicks you have a PDF file ready to be uploaded or printed.</p>
<p>And the last bit. If you ever used complex design software, you know that
sometimes it finds a corrupt font and refuses to work. The traditional way to
fix this is to remove one half of the collection and try again. If the
application is still refusing to load, you take away half of this half and try
again. So after spending an hour of your precious time on this stupid research
you find the blasted .ttf, bang it against trash bin and think: "How could I
possibly avoid waisting my time on this the next time?" Unbelievable, but the
answer is font managers again: they often have built-in font validation tools
that help finding problematic fonts and deactivating them temporarily.</p>
<p>All in all, if you are graphic or font designer, you just need a font
manager. And if you are just a user who got this fontmatrix package
in his Linux distribution installed by default and are wondering now what on
Earth you are supposed to do with it, you probably have a good idea by now.</p>
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