How to organize / group fonts in Photoshop

[djp-nyc]

When I open fonts drop down menu inside of Photoshop, I have over 300 fonts listed in alphabetical order, most of which I don't use. 

I installed about 20 fonts that I like. But how do I group them together? After typing and selecting text in Photoshop, I want to quickly flip through my 20 best fonts collection (with up and down arrow) to see which font looks better. Is there a way to do it?

I tried deleting all fonts from Library, and leaving only my 20 fonts there, but that didn't work out, because text in other applications started looking funny.

Please let me know if there is a better solution.

[station_two]

You'll need a robust font manager.  On the Mac, I would sggest FontAgent Pro (FAP).

[djp-nyc]

Thanks @statio_two. How would FAP help? Will it give a way to group fonts together inside of Photoshop's fonts drop down menu?

[Mylenium]

font grouping is eitehr built-in into the fonts to define font families or indeed requires dedicated font management tools. Adobe tools only rely on your operating system stuff and don't do any font management on their own...

Mylenium

[djp-nyc]

Thanks @Mylenium for restating the obvious. I was looking for workaround suggestions.

[emil_emil]

Can't offer you much help but can only mention how bad the font technology is in this respect. In my opinion the font usage interfaces available nowadays  are the most primitive and undeveloped than any other software solutions.

Initially, decades ago, the primary goal of the font managers was system performance. In the early desktop computers even a few dozen fonts would slow down considerably the system performance. Nowadays the computers are so much faster that I can have thousands of fonts installed without any problem. So, the major advantage of font managers is lost and I have to use them for organization purposes only. However because they are external means to a problem that needs to be solved internally on a system and program level, they are very inefficient. You have to organize your fonts externally and load or unload with another program all the time in order to have manageable font menu. However this doesn't affect the system fonts and many program fonts which are a number large enough to clutter and interfere with any external arrangement. Basically a font manager allows you to organize your fonts externally where you can choose which fonts you want or don't want to use, then the font manager  automates the installing and uninstalling of these fonts in the system fonts folder and thus limits the number of fonts that appear in the font menus. Font managers don't have access to and can't sort the font menu in anyway.

Ideally, this problem should be solved on a system level. The perfect interface I imagine would be user created sub-folders in the system Fonts folder where a font or its alias can be put and this would be the way the fonts should appear in the Fonts panels and menus of the programs with collapsible sub-menus.

[djp-nyc]

Thanks for suggestions guys, but 3rd party applications like FontAgent Pro or Suitcase Fusion would not solve this. I spoke to tech support of both companies. They told me that there is no way to organize my favorite fonts and group them together, so that they would be all in the same place in Photoshop's font drop down menu.

I am wondering if one of the (very technical) Adobe representatives can suggest a different way of achieving my goal. Adobe people, please respond...

Font Book Collections show up in all applications on my Mac, except Adobe. Furthermore, when I disable fonts in Font Book, they still show up in Photoshop. So how does one keep track of favorite fonts?

I tried renaming the fonts, but that didn't help, as they still come out under their old names in Photoshop. I tried removing fonts that I don't use from Library Fonts folder, but it made the text in other applications look funny, so I had to move them back.

How do I keep track of my favorite fonts in Photoshop?

Please tell me there is a better way than creating a note and writing down names of favorite fonts for future use.

Anyone? Hello? lol

[Chris Cox · Accepted solution]

There is no easy way for you to sort or change the Photoshop font menu.

Photoshop will present fonts sorted by script/language, then alphabetically.

But if you disable fonts in the OS, they won't appear in Photoshop.  Photoshop gets the font list from the OS.

Font Book Collections will only show up on small apps that use the simple Apple font APIs, and not on professional applications.

[STOP-SPAMMING-ME]

I am sure that you do NOT realize just how frustrating it is that we cannot collate specific fonts.

BTW, these should be MULTI-Layered so that X font which I save in the ABC folder can also be saved in the DEF folder. (or any other folders I choose)

In other words, do not restrict how often we can save specific fonts in multiple folders.

[Guest]

"How do I keep track of my favorite fonts in Photoshop?" Mmmm, maybe create a psd 'template' doc that has your 10 favorite fonts included as text layers. Then you can have that open on the side and when you need to can just drag that font layer into you new doc...

Anyone remember when you weren't a 'serious DTP pro' unless you had Adobe Type Manager?

[djp-nyc]

Thank you TLL... This was the first helpful answer.

[station_two]

No, you cannot group fonts within Photoshop's font menu with FAP, but you sure can create libraries in groups and activate them and deactivate them on the fly, even with auto activation.

You want the functionality of the old, deprecated ATR (Adobe Type Reunion) utility.  I depended heavily on it and made the transition to libraries in FAP quite smoothly when Adobe killed ATR.  The idea is that you only have a handful of essential fonts permanely activated, and activate others on the fly from the font libraries in the font manager (FAP) rather than from the font menu in Photoshop.

Sorry you happened to get an incompetent or ignorant employee when you contacted the developer of FAP. 

[djp-nyc]

Thanks Station_two. Do you mind making a small screen recording to show us how it works? Just launch Quicktime Player, and go File, New Screen Recording.

[station_two]

Sorry, I'm not at my Mac presently and won't be for several weeks.

I have posted such screen shots in the past in one or more of my previous incarnations in the forums.  I'll see if I can locate them for you.

[djp-nyc]

Please do. Thank you.

[evan.fotis]

For what its worth, AE has a very usefull way to find and sort effects and presets, which would be nice to pass on to font organizing.

Perhaps the tool presets could be assigned to various typefaces and used as such.

1. Select the font you want.

2. Open "windows>>Tool preset"

3. With the font and type tool selected click on the new tool preset icon at the bottom of the tool preset window.

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?646250-Organising-fonts-in-photoshop

[kmalm57]

I have a simple solution ... I just go into the font itself and rename my favorites with a ! or similar character at the beginning of the name. The favorites will always sort at the top of the font list in any program. This is only a good solution if you're working on your own (e.g. if you use a service that depends on a standardized name it forces you to supply the new font name with each document). I'm on Windows and use a shareware program called TypoGraf to do this. (ps ... the guts of the font info have to be changed, not the filename of the font itself for this to work.) Quick, easy, reliable.

[DonAndress]

kmalm57
Do you by any chance know a simple solution to batch process font renaming?

I mean, I have like 70 fonts that I'd like to group in Photoshop but it's a bit time consuming to do that font by font in TypoGraf...

[Trevor.Dennis]

Don, whatever the answer, it is going to depend on what operating system you are using.   What makes your post interesting, is that it suggests a lateral solution to the issue in the old thread you've awakened.

A couple of points:

1. Adobe's TypeKit is now available to everyone with a CC subscription (it used to be only for full subscription holders).  TypeKit is an excellent feature, and as good as any font manager I've previously used.
2. Copying and renaming fonts would allow you to group fonts as per the request at the top of this thread.  Prefixing copies of your favourites with a couple of zeros (i.e. '00 Arial', '00 Arial Rounded MT Bold') would supposedly force those copied fonts to the top of the font list.

With Windows I think you would need to copy those fonts from the C:\Windows\fonts\ folder to a non-system folder before you could copy and rename them.  You could then use any file renaming application you like.

Note:  I do a similar thing with my extended list of Brushes.  I prefix brush sets with meaningful names so they group themselves in the brush list.  I find this a huge help when looking for particular brushes, and I still have enough of the original name to know where I got the sets from.

[DonAndress]

Trevor, thanks for your reply.

I have all my new fonts grouped in a separate folder inside C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts

They are perfectly recognized by PhotoShop but I was hoping there would be a horizontal separator for this group in a drop down list of fonts.

There are some separators but I can't figure out how these font's are devided...

As for my config: Win7 SP1 x86 and old but still good PS CS2.

As for point 1. I'm gonna have to take a look at font managers as I have never used one and don't really know what it can give me.

Is it based on grouping fonts and then turning on/off certain groups in the system so PS could only see those I want?

Can you please guide me a little bit?

As for point 2. I don't believe it's that easy. As kmalm57 was kind enough to mention, simple file name change does not do the trick. There has to be some kind of metadata change performed in order to make PS see different name of the font. I tried both ways and only the second one works.

[kmalm57]

DonAndress wrote:

As for point 1. I'm gonna have to take a look at font managers as I have never used one and don't really know what it can give me.

Is it based on grouping fonts and then turning on/off certain groups in the system so PS could only see those I want?

Can you please guide me a little bit?

Back a zillion years ago when I used a Mac (Windows these days) I used one of the very first versions of Suitcase as a font manager. The big advantage of something like this is you can create groupings of fonts and then turn them on/off as you wish. In Windows the whole font installation thing is still very old fashioned so I'm going to imagine having a Windows version of the current Suitcase (or eq.) would be a big help, particularly if you have a giant font library. Typograf lets you do this as well, though it's not nearly as slick as a full blown program like Suitcase.

[kmalm57]

DonAndress wrote:

kmalm57
Do you by any chance know a simple solution to batch process font renaming?

I mean, I have like 70 fonts that I'd like to group in Photoshop but it's a bit time consuming to do that font by font in TypoGraf...

Sorry, no immediate knowledge of something that will batch this, though I'm sure there's a hack or automation program that could do it out there somewhere.

[NZeder]

Being able to have a selection of preferred fonts as default (your final paragraph) is exactly what I've been attempting to do . . . . without success of course!  Guess my question would be "why is this such a difficult thing to do?"  Are there no other Font Manager Apps that will over-ride the system app and allow the user to set a preferred  list?   Thank you for your comments from nine years back.  They seem to be just as valid in 2022 as they were in 2013!

[layerhero]

Have a look at Font Hero, it is a font organizer/manage plugin for Photoshop.

http://www.layerhero.com/fonthero/

Below is one screenshot.

P.S. I'm the stuff of Layerhero Software. I recommend this because there's no such an App on the market. We had talked with more than 520 designers about this requirement, after that, we developed Font Hero.

[DonAndress]

Hi there.

Thanks a lot, I'm gonna have a look. It sounds interesting.