Adobe Font Managment

[AMetcalf21]

Hey Adobe and the rest of the community,

This post is a long time coming, and although I see many people talking about this, I haven't seen hardly anything about this posted on this site. So, I am posting this as an idea/feature request on here and I hope anyone who is in the same boat as me can upvote this and grab Adobe's attention.

We need a better font managment system in all adobe programs. I posted this in Photoshop, because that is probably where it will start, but this applies to Illustrator, Indesign and all the other adobe programs that use the same font menu.

I have watched Adobe incorporate Adobe Fonts, formerly Typekit, and I am fully behind what they are doing. I love having universal and easy to use systems that stretch between all of thier suite of programs. But there are many long running issues that still haven't been touched.

Firstly, and this is the biggest problem for me personally, we need to have a way to manage fonts not part of Adobe Fonts. I know everyone is going to say we already have those, but for the most part those managers don't touch what is happening internally throughout all the adobe programs. For instance, and what has grown to a infuriating problem is the Mac system fonts. In thier recent updates, Mac has locked down thier system fonts and now no-one is able to turn off those fonts. That means whenever I view my fonts in any adobe program I am bombarded with a wall of Noto Sans and STIX fonts. All of them uncompressed into families and just taking up space. So, we need a way to internally filter out system and user installed fonts from adobe programs.

Secondly, I personally work for an apparel company, and I design graphics for a wide range of clothing lines. All of these lines use different styles of typefaces. One of them is western/outdoors and uses natural, clarendon, rough, and hand-drawn typefaces. I also work on a modern/contemporary line that uses bold sans serifs and modern didones. So, having a way to create groups of typefaces and filter by those groups within each program is a simple and essential upgrade that we all have been needing.

There are other things that can go along with this like the ability to add custom tags to user installed fonts so it can be filtered using the Adobe Fonts classification and properties filtering. There are more, and I am sure there will be many ideas in the comments.

Lastly, There are a couple ways to execute this. All of these features have been available and common in system font managers or third party font managers, but there has always been the issue that Adobe doesn't connect with any of those, and any of the groups you make don't show up in adobe programs, and you can't remove system fonts anymore with those (at least on mac).

The first solution would be to program in ways for font managers to better communicate with adobe programs, and give them better control over filtering and grouping fonts for the programs. This solution, if done well will enable these companies grow and work alongside Adobe. All good all around if it can work.

The second solution is to do it program by program. Basically you can have a font manager built in to Photoshop that lets you do all of these features, and will work similarly to any other preset manager. Not my favorite solution, since I favor universal control for things, which is why I love the current CC updates with Libraries and Adobe Fonts.

The third solution, which I would prefer, is to have that "f" (Adobe Fonts) button on the creative cloud app have all the power. It would be able to read all the fonts you have installed locally and all the system fonts. It would be able to deactivate and activate fonts (Like a gate from the system to the program). It would be able to create custom groups, and let you tag individual fonts or families with classification and property tags (or have groups for those sitting alongside custom groups).  And much more. For instance it can help manage liscenses for user installed fonts (i don't know anything about this, so I can't be specific).

TLDR,

1. Font managment needs to be better.

2. We need a way to activate and deactivate fonts just for adobe.

3. We need to have a way to categorize fonts on a custom basis and tag using Adobe's classification and properties for user installed and system fonts.

4. We need a new managments tool to do all of this - preferably to have it all built in to the Adobe CC's Font manager that already manages Adobe Fonts.

Thank You all! And I hope this gets out there and Adobe can hear it. I have seen posts going back to 2003 about this, so I know this has been a long time coming.

[Neelamk · Accepted solution]

Hi @AMetcalf21 ,

Thank you for your feedback. We appreciate your concern about Font management and other aspects of the fonts. We understand how important it is to make it user-friendly while you work on Adobe fonts concerning access, custom, and management. Our development team is constantly working to make our application the best in all aspects.

As you mentioned about font management which can be added in the Creative Cloud Desktop application, please update your Creative Cloud Desktop application installed in your Mac to Version 5.11 and can view font management components added newly. To know more about it, please refer to the article:

https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/help/upload-your-fonts-to-creative-cloud.html

You could also refer to the linked articles present on the page. If you find anything which is missing or would add up to make it more useful, please share your feedback/suggestion below so that our development team will consider it for future updates:

https://adobefonts.uservoice.com/forums/940222-adobe-fonts-feature-requests-and-feedback/suggestions...

We genuinely appreciate your suggestion for the Adobe Fonts you shared.

I hope this answers your question and gives you the right direction to share your input related to your idea. Please let me know if this helps you.

Thank you,

Neelam

[CHIYANG]

I can't agree with you more.!!

[Bobby Henderson]

I think it would be nice if the font menu in Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop had some filter settings to turn on/off visibility of OS system fonts, Adobe Fonts and fonts in various typeface class categories. Custom tags would be good for typefaces that defy classification. Custom tags would also be good for typefaces used in a certain active project.

I'm hesistant to request Adobe build a full fledged font management application. Such applications can have both good and bad rolled up into them. CorelDRAW has a font management app (formerly Bitstream Font Navigator) that is also partially built into the CDR app. It's convenient in one respect that the user doesn't have to install fonts into the OS in order to use them; the app can "watch" target folders containing font files. The downside is the app can really cause serious negative hits to performance. Too many installed/watched fonts can bog down a computer system. The quality of fonts also matters a great deal. Poorly authored fonts can make the app unstable. Picture fonts containing clip art images rather than glyphs can temporarily lock up the system when scrolling the font menu. The app delivers the best quality performance when only the fonts installed directly in the OS are available. That sorts of defeats the purpose of the font manager application.

What else can Adobe add to a standalone font management application that isn't already featured in third party applications like Extensis Suitcase or its Connect Cloud replacement?

I would just be happy if it was easier to search for fonts at the Adobe Fonts web site and within apps like Illustrator.