Sunny Side Up

As someone who can be a freak when it comes to organizing documents and files in the computer, I wish Mac OS X's Font Book would work more like iTunes or iPhoto. What do I mean by that? In iTunes you can apply tags, keywords or labels in the form of ID3 tags as a way of identifying each music file, i.e. title, artist, album, genre, grouping, beats per minute, duration, year, track number, etc. and in iPhoto, you can assign any keyword you like to your pictures and then create smart folders based on those keywords. Not in Font Book. You're stuck with the names of each set and that's all the info you get.

Fonts and music are similar in a sense. Unless you're stuck in a plain text editor churning html or scripts, you're gonna wanna choose fonts to make your document look the way you want it to look typographically. We choose the types of music we'd like to hear from time to time, we make playlists of what we want to listen to, even when setting tracks to shuffle or random. We group photos to albums consisting of photos of similar nature, when they're taken, how they're taken, and many other reasons.

Same could apply to typefaces and fonts. For some documents you'd like to use sans serif (arial, helvetica, lucida grande, myriad, etc), others you might want to use serif (times, times new roman, didot, caslon, etc), maybe use script or handwriting look, and others more you'd want a mix. It would be so much more convenient to be able to select fonts from a collection of similar designs rather than from the entire list.

Being able to assign keywords or tags to fonts in Font Book would be an absolute boon not just for professionals or budding designers but for everyone who cares about how documents look. Those who produce desktop pictures, brochures, websites, newsletters, flyers, business cards, etc. would love to be able to select fonts from shortlisted collections instead of having to pore through the entire library of hundreds of fonts in their computers.

Basically what Font Book should have is ability to assign keywords to fonts and allow smart folders exactly like how iPhoto does it. This would make groupings of fonts significantly more convenient and Font Book would be more useful than just a simple repository of fonts. Other font management programs probably have that feature but I'm not concerned about those, it's Font Book that needs an upgrade.

I'd like to say I'm surprised Apple hasn't applied these changes to the app but I'm not because Apple's focus has been to packaged apps instead, such as components to iWork, iLife and Final Cut Studio. Funny thing is adding this support to Font Book would improve those apps and many others that rely on Mac OS X's font services.

I don't think it's that difficult for Apple to update Font Book to include keywords and smart folders support but I doubt it would change before Leopard or Mac OS X 10.5 comes out sometime in December '06/January '07.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16, 2006 at 6:20 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.