Get Organized. Stay Organized.
Trying to decide how to best organize your FontAgent® catalog? Wondering how to simplify a Sets Sidebar that has grown to an unwieldy size? FontAgent includes a number of powerful features that help you simplify the organization of your font collection:
- Nested Sets that let you define subsets to simplify the structure of your sets
- Searchable Tags that let you assign keywords to fonts to classify them
- Quick Searches that return fonts with matching tags
- Smart Sets based on tag names that auto-update as you add fonts to your catalog
Nested, Hierarchical Sets
FontAgent lets you define subsets as children of top-level sets. Here are some ideas for using subsets to simplify your Sets Sidebar:
- Alphabetic sets with family subsets
- Design client sets with project subsets
- Print customer sets with job number subsets
- Foundry sets with family subsets
- Classification sets with family subsets
- Classification sets with alphabetic subsets
Once you have created your parent and child sets, you can use disclosure triangles on the parent sets to hide the child sets as you wish.
Searchable Tags
The new tag manager in FontAgent 9 lets you assign keywords to your fonts to associate them. Tags are an excellent way to:
- Use tags to describe qualitative properties of fonts
- Describe qualitative and topical font properties not included in their metrics or other metadata
- Relate fonts to each other on a casual or temporary basis
- Associate fonts with projects, processes, workflow and jobs
- Describe fonts by topic, use or category
After tagging your fonts, you can use FontAgent’s Quick Search and
Smart Sets to find fonts that match the tags.
Quick Search
FontAgent’s Search facility lets you enter a search term and instantly find all fonts whose names, metrics, metadata, tags or comments match the term. Such a simple and powerful facility provides a powerful way to run ad hoc searches and avoid creating temporary sets that clutter the Sets Sidebar.
Smart Sets
Smart Sets define associations based on font metadata. They have the added advantage that once you define their criteria, you don’t have to update them; FontAgent automatically adds and removes fonts that match the criteria. And starting with FontAgent 9, you can define Smart Sets based on tag values, providing an automatic and easily-to-maintain method for simplifying your Sets Sidebar.
Best Practices for Organizing Fonts and Sets
Here is a summary of best practices for organizing and simplifying your Sets Sidebar in FontAgent:
- Create dynamic Smart Sets based on criteria rather than static sets when you can, since Smart Sets automatically update their contents as you add fonts to your catalog.
- If you want hierarchical sets, use standard, nested sets instead of Smart Sets.
- Organize your fonts so you can use disclosure triangles to shorten your list of fonts and preserve the usability of your Sets Sidebar.
- Use tags to associate fonts with temporary projects or ones that come and go over time.
- Use tags to describe qualitative properties of fonts.
- Instead of using tags or sets to describe font metrics (such as italic, bold, etc.), use Smart Sets whose criteria are based on the metrics.
- For infrequent searches, instead of defining sets, use FontAgent’s powerful Search facility, which finds any matching font information automatically.