A couple quick recommendations
OK. I admit it. I write far too much. So I made a short summary, then realized that I needed to move it to the top or it's likely no one will actually see it. lol Here's the short version:
I have over 886 fonts gathered over 30 years and decided to try actually using Adobe fonts as a font manager.
Problem 1: Upload is drag and drop and limited to 20 fonts. Korolev has 19 styles, so that was 1 of roughly 400 families. So I had to repeat the upload process a gazillion times.
Problem 2: Only 16 fonts per page when showing what's been uploaded. Korolev is a family of 19+ fonts so I can't even get the entire family on a single page. I have 54 pages. Meanwhile there is room for 4 lines of fonts between each line. Probably because of the icon on the left which doesn't show the actual font. All of the icons are the same, so what's the point?
Problem 3: Adobe filters and skips uploading fonts already in its library to not upload them again which makes sense for a number of reasons. BUT, when viewed online, those fonts aren't recorded anywhere. So I now can only see 449 of the 886 fonts. 165 families of maybe 400 families?
Problem 4: The only way to get the fonts I'm used to working with into a "library" that I can then activate and deactivate as needed is to sift through 56 pages of 16 uploaded font files each that only displays 6 fonts at a time with the window maximized already took too long because 20 at a time is the max, write the names of all 437 of the missing fonts down and then search Adobe's 20,000 font library and add each font/family one by one.
Problem 5: When I view my list of active fonts, it appears next to useless except as a backup. I have to click on a font to actually see what it looks like. Then I can adjust the size which is nice.
Assuming that I can actually accomplish identifying and activating the remaining 437 fonts in the near future, I should have a nice list of fonts that I can activate and deactivate as needed which is the goal. But is it really worth the time if I have to go through it like this? And does anyone with so few fonts that this doesn't drive them nuts have a need for font management?
I have to go through these 54 pages, (No, I can't sort by status, just date added and name) identify all 437 fonts that didn't upload because they're in Adobe's library, write every one of them down, then open the website and search each one, select them and add them to the library to make this usable.
Recommendations:
1.) Remove the upload cap. Or at least increase it to something sensible like 100-200. Anyone with less than that doesn't actually need to upload fonts for font management. I'm sure you don't have a problem with too many people uploading too many fonts.
2.) Have the system add fonts that are rejected from upload due to them already being in Adobe's library to the same list as the uploaded fonts. Identify them with a special icon if necessary but they need to be together. If that's not feasible, then provide a separate page for these on the same page along with "Previously active", "Web Projects", and "Favorites".
3.) At Adobe.com, render the names of the fonts on the active and previously active fonts pages in the actual font so when looking for something, one doesn't have to click each and every one of them just to see what they look like. Then we can actually compare them and make decisions....this is the whole purpose of font management in the first place. So we don't have to install every font or fumble aroundf the Windows fonts settings. (It would be even better if we could enter our own text to see what chosen fonts look like in the panel on the right!)
4.) On the uploader... get rid of the huge gap between lines and other wasted space and display at the bare minimum, up to 25 of 50 or 100 at a time.
5.) Uploader again... allow sorting by status.
Yeah. That's the short version. Now for the lengthy detail if anyone cares to read it.
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I finally decided to get my fonts organized after collecting them for nearly 20 years from various sources. As I began to build a folder from various drives and machine images from over the years I realized that the number of fonts I had was enormous. So I decided to look for font software to manage it.
Lo and behold I already had one available via my Adobe account. 🙂
So I began to upload fonts and ran into a few issues that I think could use improvement and thought I would drop them here in case you're looking for that kind of feedback.
The first problem I had was fonts out the wazoo all inside individual folders. I was able to gather all of these random font folders into a single folder then do a search for *.ttf including subfolders to generate a list. A list of hundreds of fonts (many of these fonts had 10-15 versions of the same fonts such as bold, extra bold, extra bold italic, etc. (Korolev has 19!)
I went to upload them and found my first minor annoyance. I couldn't copy/paste. I had to drag and drop. Not a big deal as I was able to select a screen full then drag them to the taskbar where Adobe Fonts was which would pop up the window, then drag back up to the upload box. But copy/paste would have been smoother. This is especially true because of minor annoyance number two; you can only upload 20 fonts at a time. (While I was at it I also copied them all into a single folder so I could have a backup that was a single directory of all additional fonts.)
This was a royal pain as I had a couple fonts that had more than 20 distinct versions within the same font-family. Given the relatively small size of the files, would 50-100 be too much to ask?
Next, I noticed that occasionally I would upload a font that was already in the Adobe library. Since it's in the Adobe library, it simply doesn't upload it. But here's the problem.....If it isn't uploaded, it doesn't get activated and it isn't loaded into my personal list of fonts. So I have a folder of 886 fonts from I don't know how many families that I attempted to upload. Adobe shows 449 active fonts from 159 families. Adobe shows 87 fonts from 41 families inactive. These are fonts that I've used over the last year that I then turned back off. There is some overlap as I have many of those fonts already on my machine.
In case I made that too confusing, here's an example. I still have the window open to add fonts to CC. It shows that I uploaded 886 total fonts. (The uploader doesn't break them into families but some are quite large). So at least 437 fonts are probably already in the Adobe library but from what I can tell, there is no separate list of my fonts that uploaded. So if I had a project that I decided that I wanted to look through my limited library of pre-selected fonts to choose from, how exactly am I supposed to do that?
The only way that I see is to browse the entire 20,000+ font library which would simply take too long. As it is, I am able to view in my uploads, only the fonts that I uploaded that are NOT in Adobe's library.
So for example, on page 1 (of 56 separate pages of just 16 fonts each) that shows uploaded, there is a font called "TrainOne-regular.ttf". It shows "Unable to Add", "Font is available in Adobe fonts library."... OK. Great. So I can scroll through my list of 449 fonts on Adobe.com and well, it's not in my list. Nor is it in the deactivated list. To add it, I will have to do a search for it, find it in your database, and add it. (When I get all of this done I'll then turn off most of them and activate as needed of course but for now I'm just leaving them as-is while I work through this.)
Now, that isn't so bad on a single font. But I have 437 fonts that before I can even begin to search for them, I have to visit 56 separate pages and write the names down of every one of the 437 fonts that adobe has in the library before I even begin manually searching for them all. Of course, there are plenty of families. A rough guess is that I'll actually only need to do about 200 or so separate searches. But seriously, this is nuts.
And to make that even worse, the screen is a scrolling list of 18 fonts per page that displays just 6 at a time!
So scroll 6, scroll 6, write a name, write a name, scroll 6, write a name, write a name, click page two, go to adobe.com and search font 1, add to my list, search font 2, add to my list, search font 3, add two of six....... Then page 2 of 56.
What would make this a tiny bit easier would be if I could maybe get 50 on a page, and see 25 at a time without gap between text lines that's 4X the size of the text. I suppose this would be helpful with limited fonts finger-poking on a tablet, but who operates full-blown PS by finger touch?
I am generally not one to gripe. I know you all put a ton of work into Photoshop alone, let alone the entire software library, etc. I've been using PS for 26 years this month so I won't be going anywhere. lol I've been slacking the last several years as I run a small ISP instead of a studio as I did 10 years ago but I still like to dabble. But I have to say that this implementation for fonts needs a LOT of work. Aside from what I've already mentioned, there's the matter that when viewing my half-list of fonts, I can only view a single font at a time by clicking on it. If it's a member of a family I have to click the family to open it, and then click the font, and only then can I see a sample on the right.
It just feels like at every step in the process I'm being led to waste as much time as humanly possible.
