MPFD – Font Sleuth

Mac Programs For Designers post number 6 is on Font Sleuth. Font Sleuth is a program for browsing through your fonts quickly and easily.

You might think, “Why not just use Font Book” but with Font Book you only see one font on screen at a time. Where as with Font Sleuth you see a sample of all fonts you have saved on your computer but you can also view fonts that have not been saved / installed. This is really useful for me as I have loads of fonts saved on my external hard drive and I don’t have to install them before I can see what they look like. 

Font Sleuth allows you to type in text so you can preview it on screen, and find the most suitable font. And you can also change the colour of the font, play with bold, italic, alignment and point size. 

I know there are a lot of font management programs that are better but all I wanted was a program that allows me to view my fonts better than Font Book.

In my post: MPFD – Art Director’s Toolkit. I mentioned that one of the utilities was “Symbol” and you can view keyboard shortcuts to get character symbols, and Font Sleuth also has this option. I do like the way Font Sleuth has displayed the symbols, as you can easily locate a symbol.

This program isn’t free, but you can download a trial version here.

I know everyone will have their own personal favourite font program, but for me it is Font Sleuth, it is easy to use and basic, and it is all I really need.