FontCase can be extended with all sorts of plugins. Once you've downloaded a plugin, double-click to install it. You should then be able to find them in the Fonts menu or in the Tools menu, depending on the plugin

Want to create your own plugins? Click here to find out how!

Available Plug-ins

• 

  Export to Font Panel

  by Bohemian Coding

  Collections you created in FontCase will show up in the standard System font panel.

• 

  Import from Font Panel

  by Bohemian Coding

  Collections you created in Font Book or the standard Font Panel will be imported in FontCase.

• 

  Collection from Selection

  by Bohemian Coding

  Creates a new collection from the currently selected fonts.

• 

  Clear System Font Cache

  by Bohemian Coding

  If fonts of you are behaving weird, you can always try to clear the System Font Cache. This plugin lets you do that.

• 

  Clear FontCase Cache

  by Bohemian Coding

  Clears the cache for the selected fonts. May prove useful if some fonts have bad previews.

• 

  Export Metadata as XML

  by Bohemian Coding

  Lets you export the metadata for the selected font as a plain XML file.

• 

  Import Metadata from XML

  by Bohemian Coding

  The counterpart of the previous plug-in. A convenient way to exchange metadata between machines.

• 

  Add Metadata

  by Bohemian Coding

  Let's you apply tags/genres or designers to multiple fonts without overwriting existing metadata.

• 

  Remove Metadata

  by Bohemian Coding

  Let's you remove tags/genres or designers from multiple fonts, leaving the other metadata intact.

Third-party plug-ins

• 

  Designer Search

  by Itai Ferber

  Opens up the FontShop.com profile page for a font's designer and shows you other fonts by them.

• 

  CSV Export

  by Joe Turner

  Exports the current selection in a CSV text file.

• 

  Find Missing Fonts

  by Binary Gastronome

  Scans the standard font folders and imports into FontCase any missing fonts.

FontCase Help

FontCase is the new font management application from Bohemian Coding and FontShop. It combines a simple and familiar interface with a powerful arrangement of tools. Don't be deceived by its simple interface, FontCase has a lot of powerful tools built in which you might miss the first time you run the application. This manual is arranged by topic so click on the links below to find out more.

Getting Started with FontCase

• Getting Started with FontCase

  FontCase combines a simple and familiar interface with a powerful arrangement of tools, some of which are not immediately visible when you launch the application. Instead of trying to show off every feature, the application sits back and tries to serve you in the best way possible.

• Apple's Font Book

  For users who are used to working with Font Book we advise you to stick to one application only, use FontCase or Font Book, but preferably not both at the same time. Font collections created with Font Book will be imported by FontCase so there's really no need to use Font Book anymore when you have FontCase installed on your system.

• Running FontCase for the first time

  When you run FontCase for the first time it will ask your permission to import fonts already present on your system. More specifically, it will look in the /System/Library/Fonts, /Library/Fonts and ~/Library/Fonts folders, subfolders and aliasses included, to import fonts.

• The Vault

  FontCase will create a vault in your Library folder (/users/yourname/library/application support/FontCase) and will copy all fonts to that directory. One of the benefits is that you'll have a nice backup of all your fonts. The vault also makes sure sure your original font files will not get corrupted because before activating a font, it will first copy the font to your ~/Library/Fonts folder. Another benefit to this is that you only need to copy or backup this folder if at one time you switch to a new Mac or otherwise. FontCase also saves all its metadata in this folder which makes it easy to continue using FontCase on another system. You can move the vault to another location by going to the preferences, for example to move it to an external drive.

• Activate and Deactivate without relaunching applications

  FontCase can activate and deactivate fonts from its vault and when it does so, it copies the font to the Fonts directory in the user's Library folder to make sure the original file will not get corrupted. It will even make sure you won't have to relaunch applications already running to get them to recognise the font; both consumer-level applications like TextEdit and the iWork Suite as well as the Adobe CS4 Suite will not have to be relaunched. All this is done automatically and there's no need to install additional plugins like other applications do. For more information about installing and activating fonts, please read chapter about Installing, activating and uninstalling fonts.

• Importing

  In the Import Window, clicking the OK-button starts the import process which, depending on the number of fonts it has to import, might take some time. When the import process is done you will see a familiar looking interface; on the left there's a Source List and on the right you will see a nice preview of all your fonts. Fonts you do not have installed on your system will be displayed in gray but will still be rendered.

The Interface

• The Interface

  When you launch FontCase you will be presented with a familiar looking and clean interface. But don't be deceived, there are a lot of powerful features in FontCase and in this chapter we will introduce you to some of these.

• The Toolbar

  The toolbar gives access to the most commonly used functions. By default they're presented in this order:

  
  1. The first button can be used to activate or deactivate fonts. When the button glows (like above) it indicates that the font is already activated and when it's black it means that it isn't. Fore more information, read the chapter about Installing, activating and uninstalling fonts.
  2. The next three buttons let you switch the main view between grid view, outline view, and list view. See the chapter about Viewing Fonts for more information.
  3. The third button shows a very quick preview of your font, very reminiscent of QuickLook in the Finder.
  4. The fourth button brings up the Info pane where you can adjust all metadata of the selected fonts including Tags, Genres, Foundries and Designers. The window was designed to work the same way as the Info Panel in iTunes so users should feel right at home.
  5. The last button shows the Compare Pane, which gives you extra tools to compare multiple fonts in a very elegant way. Read the chapter about Comparing Fonts for more information.
  
  
  

• The Source List

  On the left side of your window you can see a source list which will looks a lot like in iTunes and the Finder. FontCase supports both normal collections as well as smart collections. If FontCase found any shared libraries on the local network, they will also be displayed here. FontCase will also display all Foundries, Genres, Designers and Tags in the sidebar. These new groups in the sidebar just behave like a normal collection: they can be renamed and you can drag fonts from one to the other to assign that particular Foundry or Tag to the seleted Fonts. See the second part of the manual for more tips and tricks about how to use this.
• Main View

  The right part of the window shows the fonts found in the collection you selected in the source list. FontCase can display your fonts in three ways and you can switch between them using the three buttons in the toolbar. The first one displays your fonts in grid view, the best way to quickly shift through a large collection of fonts. The second button shows an outline view with as much metadata as possible. In the third mode, one string will be rendered by every font, making it a good way to compare certain fonts. Note that you can use the slider in the bottom-right to increase the size of your preview, both in the grid view as well as in the list view.

• Bottom Pane

  The bottom pane can display additional information about the select variations. There are three tabs in this pane: The Glyph pane can display all unicode glyphs supported by the selected font and will also display the unicode code and html entities. For more information look in the chapter about Glyph Tables. The waterfall pane will display the selected sample string string in the selected font, or you can create your own sample text. The Body Pane displays a large string in three columns in the selected font. This is perfect if you want to see how the font looks in a normal paragraph. The slider in the bottom-right can also be used here to adjust the size of the body text or the glyph table.

• Compare

  When you select one or select multiple fonts in the main view, you can select 'Compare' from the menu and a large pane will slide down where you can compare the fonts you selected. You can compare individual Glyphs, compare the fonts when used as a header and compare body text. More about this feature in the appropriate chapter. For more information, please read the chapter about Comparing Fonts.

• Drag and Drop

  FontCase allows you to to drag or copy strings or individual characters to another application as a pdf image. From almost any part of the application you can drag the pdf images; the grid view and preview-list, but also from the waterfall, glyph pane and the character popup window. This allows you to quickly send previews of certain fonts to clients or use a glyph in Photoshop or Illustrator without the need to activate the actual font.

• Samples

  In the bottom left is a list of all available samples FontCase can display. In various parts of the interface, FontCase can render a font using a sample text. In this list you choose which text you want to have rendered. Of course your preference is saved between sessions.

Organizing your Fonts

• Organizing your Fonts

  As explained in second chapter, FontCase can display your fonts in three ways; grid, outline, and list-view. Outline view is perfect for quickly entering and inspecting metadata but since it doesn't display a preview, in day-to-day use you will probably prefer the grid view.

• Take a quick look

  Note you can press spacebar in every view to see a large instant preview of your font which will remind you of QuickLook in the Finder.

• Metadata

  When you double-click a font or variation, a sheet will pop down where you can edit all metadata available for the selected variations. Of particular importance are the Genres and Tags fields. When entering tags or genres, FontCase will autofill what you type and when you want to enter multiple tags, separate them with a comma.

  

  
  Some fonts come with a specimen, a pdf containing instructions from the designer on how and where the font should be used. FontCase can import these pdfs easily; open the metadata window and drop the pdf on the specimen well. FontCase will copy the pdf to its vault so you will never have to look for it again. The pdf will now show up in the info-sheet where you can open it.

• Languages

  Sometimes you just need to know what fonts contain Greek or Cyrillic characters. FontCase automatically analyzes all the fonts in your library in the background and displays the languages they support in the sidebar. Note that if you have a very large library, it will take a while to get all the languages analyzed.

Viewing Fonts

• Viewing Fonts

  FontCase has various ways to preview your fonts and it may depend in your need at a particular time which view you prefer.

• Waterfall

  The waterfall pane is an excellent way to preview fonts. It can display any sentence at different sizes. The string it displays can be chosen from the samples list in the bottom left. Characters not supported by the current font will be displayed in gray and rendered by another font instead.

• QuickLook in FontCase

  Grid- and List-view show previews of your fonts, but when in either one of these views you can press spacebar to show a preview of the selected fonts; a QuickLook-like popup window be shown, which looks familiar to the waterfall pane discussed earlier. Pressing spacebar will close the window again. Note you can use the arrow keys to move the selection in the background and the popup window will change as accordingly.

• Grid View

  
  The grid view can be set to display variations as well as families. When set to display families, it will display a stack for each family and the number in the top-left corner is the same as the number of variations in that font.
  Fonts that are not installed on your system will be displayed in dark gray and installed fonts will be blue making it very easy to distinguish between the two. Note that you can use the slider in the bottom-right of the window to increase the size of the previews.
  

  System fonts have a 'danger bar' attached to them (third font in the screenshot above) indicating that they can't be deactivated. Fonts with a green bar are activated and fonts with a gray bar are deactivated.

• Outline View

  The outline view is s a very powerful and fast way to shift through your fonts or to change metadata. Note you can set which columns will be shown in the View Menu or by pressing Command + J. There's also a column which previews the font for you using the same text as in the waterfall pane. You can set new sample text in the bottom-left of the window.
  When you browse shared libraries, a 'Download' column will automatically be added to let you quickly download certain fonts.
  
• Arranging your Fonts

  By default, your fonts are arranged by their family name but you can change this. For the outline view, you can this by clicking on the appropriate header but in the grid and list view you can do so from the menu. Choose a suitable sorting criteria from the View --> Arrange menu and your view will display the critera.

Comparing Fonts

• Comparing Fonts

  
  The list view is an easy way to compare fonts but it also has its downsides. There may be fonts in the current collection you're not interested in at the moment, or you might want to know how the fonts look when used for a paragraph.
  FontCase can also help you with this; if you select one or more fonts and click 'Detail' from the menu or toolbar, a new page will roll down which offers three ways to compare fonts; by comparing individual glyphs, by comparing body text and by comparing header text.
  

• View Glyphs

  The selected fonts are shown besides each other and for every font will render its unicode characters. On the bottom of the window you can choose which Unicode plane to display and in the bottom-right you can as always change the size of the previews:

  

• View Header

  
  The second mode will let you compare the fonts in a very similar way to the normal List view, but there are a few extras in this mode. On the bottom of the window you can choose how FontCase should determine the font size of the previews; should it (a) render all fonts the same size (according to the slider on the bottom-right again) or (b) should it scale every font up until it fits the width of the window.
  This last option may be useful because not every font looks the same if rendered at the same size - Gill Sans at 24pt looks smaller than Geneva at the same size for example.
  

  

• View Body

  When you select this mode, a few paragraphs of text will be rendered in each of these fonts. As always, the bottom-right slider will increase or decrease the size of the font. You can also choose what text you want to display; by default it displays a standard 'lorem ipsum'-text but there are a few other variations available.

  

Sharing your Fonts

• Sharing your Fonts

  
  FontCase lets you share your fonts with other people on your local network just like iPhoto does this with your photos, and like iPhoto, it lets you also download fonts from shared libraries with a single click.
  FontCase can also render fonts from shared libraries for the grid- and outline view without downloading the actual font itself. However you want to see the individual glyphs ore use the Compare mode, FontCase will ask you to download the font first because FontCase really needs the information enclosed in the font file. When you download a font, it will be added to your library and saved in the vault, but after that you will have to activate the font from FontCase before you can actually use it in other applications.
  Sharing can be disabled in the preferences along with a few other options. You can let FontCase look for shared libraries but not actually share your own. Of course you can also protect your library with a password to only allow certain people to view your fonts.
  For now sharing only works on the local network and if you're not on the same network, you won't see each other. If you have trouble sharing your library, you might want to open port 8612 on your firewall.
  Note that just like music and movies, most of the time fonts are not freely distributable. You should take care when sharing fonts with other people, sharing is intended for personal use only. If in doubt, consult the license info that should have come with the fonts you downloaded or purchased.
  

Glyph Tables

• Glyph Tables

  
  FontCase also has a full-featured Glyph table built in and, as with every other feature, it works with both installed and non-installed fonts. Click the small button next to the view mode buttons on the bottom of the window to toggle the glyph pane.
  The glyph pane can display every Unicode character provided that it's supported by the font. On top-right of the glyph pane is a popup where you can choose which unicode plane should be displayed, and the number next to it is the number of glyphs the font supports in that plane. If none of the glyphs in a plane are supported by the select font, the plane not appear in the list.
  When you double-click on a glyph you will see a small popup window appear. This window shows a larger preview of the glyph and also displays the name, unicode code and html entities of that glyph. If you click the appropriate button, the unicode or html code will be copied to the clipboard.
  When you change the selection with the arrows the popup will move the the new position and display info about the new glyph. If you press the Escape key, the popup will be hidden. This popup also shows up in the Compare-Glyphs mode. Note that when you drag individual glyphs from the glyph table or the popup to another application it will paste a pdf version of the glyph. You can also copy glyphs this way using Edit -> Copy.

Installing, activating and uninstalling Fonts

• Installing, activating and uninstalling Fonts

  
  Since FontCase keeps all its fonts safe in its vault, it can work with fonts that are not installed in one of the designated font folders on your system such as ~/Library/Fonts or /System/Library/Fonts.
  In FontCase-terminology we call a font 'installed' if besides being in FontCase' library (thus in the vault), the font is also placed in one of these designated font folders. This means that probably the majority of fonts in your library will not be installed on the system.
  If you choose to install a font through FontCase, FontCase will copy the font file from the vault to ~/Library/Fonts and activate that copy. The original font file will thus remain safe in the vault.
  Likewise, when you choose to uninstall a font through FontCase, FontCase will remove the font from ~/Library/Fonts (if present) and deactivate the font throughout the system. Fonts installed in /System/Library/Fonts and /Library/Fonts cannot be uninstalled because, aside from privilege issues, they are most likely used by the operating system. If you're absolutely sure about removing these fonts, you should remove them manually.
  If you install a Font with FontCase it will automatically be picked up by all running application, Photoshop CS4 included. FontCase does this without installing any additional plugins for these applications.
  

Printing

• Printing

  
  Even though FontCase lets you view your fonts from all angles, sometimes you just want to see your fonts on paper. Luckily, FontCase also has powerful printing support built in.
  Select a few fonts and choose 'Print...' from the File-menu to print the selected fonts. FontCase will dedicate one page per font and for every font it will print the following:
  1. Metadata you assigned to the font; designers, tags and everything else you entered.
  2. Header text will be rendered at different sizes; 10,12,14,18 and 24 pt.
  3. Three paragraphs will be rendered in the selected font at 10, 12 and 14 pt.
  4. The remaining space is filled with the first three planes from the unicode table; all common lating characters.
  So if you select three fonts, three pages will be printed, one page per font. Below you can see a preview of one page. Please don't waste paper by printing all fonts in your library, please consider saving the environment.
  

Tips and Tricks

• Tips and Tricks

  This part of the manual is designed as a reference guide; it contains tips and tricks to help you get the most out of FontCase and if you have any problems, please take a look here first.

• Slow?

  If, when you first launch FontCase, you find it to be slow, keep in mind that FontCase is generating previews for the grid view in the background. The progress-indicator on the bottom indicates if this is the case. Also, when FontCase has imported many fonts and created all these previews, it will have temporarily activated a these fonts, both to extract metadata and to draw the preivews. Restarting FontCase can then result in much better performance. Keep in mind though that quitting FontCase the first time may be slower than usual because it has to deactivate all these fonts again.

• Sharing

  FontCase can share its Library over your local network only. It does so by using Apple's Bonjour¨ service and it operates on port 8612. If other people are unable to find your Shared Library, make sure your firewall has this port opened.
  Also note that although FontCase provides an easy way to share fonts, copyright laws still apply. Please respect the rights of the respective owners and know that you and you alone are responsible for abiding by and complying with your local laws and exercising proper judgment.
  

• Skimming

  Just like in iPhoto with events, you can skim a family in the grid view to quickly see its contents. Just move your mouse over a family-stack from left to right and you'll see the individual tiles. You can turn this off in the preferences if you want.

• Samples

  Throughout the application there are places where fonts are rendered with a certain sample text (Sometimes a sentence containing all characters in the alphabet). By default, It renders the following string: "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.", but this string can be changed to something else in Samples list in the bottom-left of the window. Once changed here, it will have been changed in the entire system; the waterfall, the HUD window and the printing panel.

• Really smart collections

  When you add a new smart collection you'll be asked to construct the conditions for it. The top row lets you set if any, all or none of the conditions should be true. If you hold down the option-key in there, you can add another row like that inside it, letting you construct really advanced conditions.

• Samples

  You can drag and drop from waterfall-view on the desktop to create a pdf file of the string. This also works with dragging from the outline, glyph table and compare mode.

• Foundries, Genres in the Sidebar

  The sidebar also displays foundries genres, designers and tags in the sidebar. These work just like normal collections. For example, when you give a variation a new Foundry, it will automatically show up as a new collection in the sidebar containing all the Fonts which have that foundry assigned to them. You can even drag a variation from one Foundry to another to change the foundry associated to the variation and if you delete a variation from the Source List, it's also removed from all variations. These groups greatly help with assigning metadata to your fonts; if you drag a font to a certain Tag-collection, the tag will be assigned and the same goes for the other groups.
  A few tricks here may prove to be useful. I'll describe these using the Tag-groups, but they work the same for the other type of groups.
  You can drag selected fonts to the 'TAG'-header to create a new Tag assigned to all the selected Fonts. Likewise you can select any other type of grop (a genre, designer, foundry or a (smart) collection) to this header to create a new tag group the same way. If you drag them to a tag directly the tag will be assigned to all fonts in that group. For example, dragging a designer to a foundry group means that all fonts you assigned to this designer will also be assigned to this foundry.
  Every variation can of course have multiple Tags or Genres, but also multiple Designers of Foundries assigned to it. When you think about it, a tag-group behaves like a normal collection but only has a different icon standing in front of it.
  

• Another Way of Adding Fonts to Groups

  When you select one or more fonts in the main view and you right-click them, a contextual menu will apear. Under the 'assign to'-item a menu shows which should look familiar to the sourcelist. You can select any item here to copy the selected fonts to that group in the same way as described in the previous paragraph.

Plug-ins in FontCase

• What are plug-ins?

  Plug-ins are small pieces of third-party code that provide some extra functionality to FontCase. These plug-ins can be downloaded here for free, and you can also learn how to write and submit your own. Note you have to be familiar with Cocoa and Objective-C to do so.

Advanced Vault Management

• FontCase Vault

  As you will probably know, FontCase stores all its fonts in a vault - a bundle only intended to be read by FontCase. The benefit of this is that your fonts will be kept safe from getting corrupted or similar. But apart from the fonts, FontCase also stores all the metadata in the vault. This gives you great flexibility in working with multiple machines and multiple vaults. Look in the FontCase preference if you want to move or relocate your vault

• USB Disk or External Drive

  For example, you could put the vault on a usb-stick or external harddrive and if you have multiple macs, you can install FontCase on all these macs and let them all use the one vault on that usb stick or drive. Now can you have the same fonts and metadata on two different machines.

• Very Important

  Bear in mind that the vault does not allow concurrent access; you should not put the vault on a network drive and open the vault with two different copies of FontCase at the same time! However if there's only one copy of FontCase working on a vault, everything will be fine.