Organizing Your Fonts
Trying to decide how to best organize your FontAgent catalog? Wondering how to simplify a Sets Sidebar that has grown to an unwieldy size? FontAgent includes a number of powerful features that help you simplify the organization of your font collection:
- Nested Sets that let you define subsets to simplify the structure of your sets
- Tags that you can assign to fonts to classify and search them
- Quick Searches that return fonts with matching tags
- Smart Sets based on tag names that auto-update as you add fonts to your catalog
The Sets Sidebar
The Sets Sidebar appears on the left side of the FontAgent® window and lists sets, which are logical associations of fonts in your FontAgent database. The blue number to the right of each set shows the number of fonts contained in the set.
When you select a set in the list, FontAgent displays:
- The fonts contained in the set in the viewers in the main window
- An activation switch that you can use to activate and deactivate the fonts in the set.
Filtering Sets
To filter the sets displayed in the Sets Sidebar, use the Search field that appears at the upper-right of the top pane.
Enter a keyword into the Search field. As you enter characters, FontAgent automatically searches your for the characters entered. As you type, the List or Table View appearing below the Search field displays the sets that match your string.
When FontAgent finds a subset that matches the characters entered, the subset is displayed in the parent set.
Types of Sets Displayed
The Sets Sidebar organizes your sets in groups.
My Sets
Select a set whose fonts you manually added to the set.
Nested Sets
Select a set whose fonts you manually added to the set.
Smart Sets
Select a Smart Set whose fonts match criteria that you specify.
System Sets
Select a system set that is automatically created and tracked by FontAgent.
Managed Fonts
Select to list all fonts in your FontAgent database, as well as fonts that have been recently imported into your FontAgent database.
Subscription Font Services
Adobe Fonts is a subscription font service that is automatically recognized by FontAgent. It displays it a set for these services in the Sets Sidebar. Fonts installed and activated by other subscriptions appear in the All Fonts set.
Display and Hide the Sets Sidebar
To toggle the display of the Sets Sidebar (the left sidebar), click the first button appearing on the left side of the FontAgent toolbar.
Best Practices for Organizing Fonts and Sets
Here is a summary of best practices for organizing and simplifying your Sets Sidebar in FontAgent:
- Create dynamic Smart Sets based on criteria rather than static sets when you can, since Smart Sets automatically update their contents as you add fonts to your catalog.
- If you want hierarchical sets, use standard, nested sets instead of Smart Sets.
- Organize your fonts so you can use disclosure triangles to shorten your list of fonts and preserve the usability of your Sets Sidebar.
- Use tags to associate fonts with temporary projects or ones that come and go over time.
- Use tags to describe qualitative properties of fonts.
- Instead of using tags or sets to describe font metrics (such as italic, bold, etc.), use Smart Sets whose criteria are based on the metrics.
- For infrequent searches, instead of defining sets, use FontAgent’s powerful Search facility, which finds any matching font information automatically.