Font Collection Organizing

[The Texas Dude]

Font Collecting like all such endeavors begins with an Interest which segues to an Obsession but always ends up as a SICKNESS! You find there is not enough time in a day to tend to your collection and lead a normal life, so the normal life goes out the window!

Having used Corel Draw and Microsoft's Office products I naturally acquired many fonts over the years. I would on occasion buy the 10,000 fonts for $10 cd collections. These only pushed me further down the road... Along the way, I used the internet to research certain designers' work. Was great fun to find that Manfred Klein had over 3000 fonts of his own available. I also joined some font groups on Yahoo and Google and started saving everything. Finally found I had to figure out a scheme to organize this mess as I could no longer find a font in the haystack.

There are perhaps 5 methods to use I was told:

1. No structure. Keep all fonts on their original media (floppies, cds, zip files, hard drives and the like. This is how everyone begins I guess. The downside is you may have 50 Arials and can't find Arial Narrow anywhere because it's on some misplaced zip disk

2. Consolidation into single file directory based on file names. By putting all fonts together you know where they are and can quickly find one. Using the file directory features of identifying duplicates ("This destination already contains a file called xxx") you can eliminate having two of the same file name. This action puts all your fonts in a single place, pares your accumulation down considerably and begins the cleaning process.

In my mind the goal of a font collection, like a stamp collection or vintage car collection is not to keep every font, but to develop a set of unique fonts of every type and style. It is a lot cheaper and easier with fonts.

3. Renaming font files to font names. Often the font file name is shortened to perhaps 8 letters and a suffix (so-called 8.3 format). It is not possible in 8 letters to describe a font named Arial Narrow Condensed Italic, although ArialNCI might work... But that could also stand for Arial Normal Cyrillic Inverted which we all know is a different font!

There are utility programs which rename each font file to the internal font name. Using these first off, externalizes and standardizes the names, but also allows the file directory procedures noted above to consolidate "true" unique fonts based on the very long names.

This is the basic structure I use today as much of my analysis is based on font names and by making the font name visible in the directory I can directly see fonts that may be related or in the same font family. The problem is this scheme doesn't tell you anything about what the font characteristics may be beyond name.

4. Some very sophisticated and complete font collections have been organized by Font Designer (one who makes fonts) or Font Foundry (place where fonts are made - or distributed from).

There is free software which can organize your fonts by Designer or Foundry so it can be done very quickly. One thing you so find is there are many stolen copies of fonts which no longer have the attribution attributes attached. Since anyone can create fonts today using a Font Editor, thieves can also change the copyright information at will. It takes a thorough knowledge of fonts and Google to track down the original designer in order to put them in the right category.

Using this approach you can go to the Designer's web site and see if there are other fonts that you don't have but could buy and accumulate. It is a goal of many font collectors to have all the fonts from certain Designers they like, rather than all the fonts in the world. (I call them quitters!)

5. Organize fonts by Subject Matter. Do you want to see all the fonts with cats in them or are monospaced (all the same size) or show Mayan signs? This can be done if you look at each font and "tag" it accordingly.

Again, there are software packages which make this grouping easy. Since a font might belong to several categories, the better programs allow multiple assignments to be made so you can find a font which is Monospaced and includes Mayan Cats ... or something.

The downside is you have to look at every font and decide which group(s) it belongs in. But you only have to do this once thanks to the power of the computer!

I use this combination where all fonts are stored alphabetically by font name and have "subject" tags which can be used to select subgroups of interesting fonts.


As with any collection it is a challenge to get and stay organized. With fonts this may become a learning experience as you have examples of different writing or language systems, can see the track of historical writing, and have a way of writing which is the same as your mood or attitude. (Grunge, graffiti and messy!)

Deep Sigh. There is no achievable goal to collect all the fonts in the world as new ones are being published every day.