Fonts.

My own personal bugaboo is fonts, or the management thereof. I love fonts (typefaces to be correct), I'm grateful they exist, and all that. Yet I've never developed a satisfactory system for managing the huge number of them that I have.

The funny thing about having a ton of tiny files is it slows to a crawl programs like virus/malware checkers and anything else that combs through your hard drive file by file. You could have the same amount of occupied space on your drive, but if it was divided into 100 files instead of 8,000, any such operations would only take a fraction of the time.

But that's besides the point. The thing is, I love fonts, I want to be able to choose and use fonts at will, but I don't want to clobber my system and make it choke on its own poached-egg-on-a-bagel so that I have to perform the ctrl-alt-heimlich maneuver on it. Simply dumping every font I own into the Windows\Fonts folder seems to be an incredibly bad idea.

I've tried different strategies. I've used Suitcase, which allows you to create "sets" which are basically collections of pointers to the real font files, and then activates them on the fly (which moves them to said Font folder). After you're done doing your thing, you can deactivate the set and your fonts return to their place outside your system folder. Sounds good, and it is. But Suitcase for Windows crashes often, and many programs have to be restarted when you activate a new set because they apparently don't continually poll the Font folder for changes. Adobe apps are generally good about this, but not many others are.

I've tried some other pretty geeky programs aas well as manual methods whose details I will refrain from boring you with. And yes, before we go any further, I *should* be using a Mac and using Suitcase Fusion. And I will, some day soon. But for now, I need ideas on how to make this work on Windows. More fundamentally, I'm searching for philosophies of font organization which transcend platform.

Do you have all your fonts in one folder alphabetized? If not, how to you split them up? By purpose (display, body)? There are some fonts that don't fall so neatly into those categories. And even then you'd be left with two huge groups in need of further division. Do you sort by foundry? This seems arbitrary and not very helpful, except in a cool historic way. What about by how well you like them (great body fonts, decent display fonts, etc)? What about by general style (script, roman, dingbat)? Do you only choose a subset of your entire collection that you think you will use 90% of the time and keep those ones activated? See how complicated this gets?

And then the doozy - How do you create a proper font book so that when you need one, you can efficiently browse your collection and choose the correct typeface for the job? I've got Adobe's latest book, but not those from other foundries, and this leaves me in a bind. Not surprisingly, there is a dearth of decent software allowing you to print quality samples from which to make a gallery book. Good news - I have fonts up the yin-yang. Bad news - unless I want to go blind looking at each face, the very size of the collection works against my ability to choose the correct one.

So what I'm looking for are your opinions, your experiences, anything you might have to offer on this onerous topic. I realize most of the people liable to read this blog are not designers as such, but you don't have to be to have an opinion on something like organization. It's a metatopic disguised as a concrete practical problem, and metatopics are what this site is all about. Anyone?