Click on one to copy it, then paste it into your document.

A list of the designers of some of the most popular fonts in history appears, and when you roll over one of them, their photo appears along with a short list of the most popular fonts they designed.

It’s a terrific way to get a connection to a font designer, and also see a connection between the fonts that he or she designed.

Insider Software’s

Version 4 for Mac and Windows includes these features:

• SmartSearch: an advanced search feature that finds fonts — both locally and on the Internet — that match concept keywords, and displays found fonts in their native typefaces.
• Integrated search: purchase and download of fonts from the Internet.
• Waterfall view that displays fonts in cascading point sizes.
• Improved font diagnostics and integrity engine that checks fonts before being added.

If you’ve been holding off on migrating to FontAgent Pro because it didn’t work in Windows, now you can.
FontAgent Pro costs $99.95.

Adobe calls their brand of OpenType fonts that have no additional features “Standard” OpenType fonts. When additional features are added, Adobe brands them OpenType “Pro” fonts.

Adobe’s OpenType “Pro” fonts have extended character sets, often with true fractions, small caps, additional ligatures, swash characters, dingbats, and more. OpenType Pro fonts also incorporate advanced layout intelligence such as stylistic sets and automatic fraction replacement.

To see how to access alternate characters in QuarkXPress 7 and 8, see Jay Nelson’s post “Apply Alternate OpenType Glyphs“.

To explore any stylistic sets that may be in an OpenType font, first apply the font to some text, then in the Measurements palette click on the “O” button.

Any stylistic sets that are NOT available in the current font appear in brackets. You can pick and choose among the others, combining them as you like.

If a stylistic set has a checkmark next to it, that means that optional characters in that set will be applied to the currently selected text. If a stylistic set has a checkmark next to it, but also has brackets around it, that means that although the current font doesn’t include that stylistic set, if you change the font to an OpenType font that does include that stylistic set, then that set will apply to the text. In other words, these choices of sets are remembered with the text itself.

Its timeline lists fonts by date and style, and includes origins of font names. And get this: this remarkable reference costs just $18.21 at Amazon.com.

The book is published by Cassell Illustrated.

“Font Management Best Practices Leopard, CS3 & More!” focuses on using Extensis Suitcase for font management, but its information is universal. Get it at www.extensis.com.

David Creamer’s “Font Management in OS X for Graphic Artists” explains font formats, locations, required fonts, font managers, and gives a step-by-step procedure for collecting and managing all your fonts. Get it at www.ideastraining.com/PDFs/OSX_FontManagement.pdf

Some sets also include experimental alternates (distressed, scratched, over- or under-inked, spritzed with solvents, allowed to drip or run, etc.) The collection also includes eight complete fonts, five partial fonts, several mixed (random) fonts, and printed wood shapes (circles, squares, etc.). The entire collection costs $299.

• You can open and work with uninstalled fonts.
• You can view the outlines and anchor points of any glyph (character).
• You can copy and paste any glyph as a Bézier-based PDF into Illustrator, Photoshop, Preview, etc.
• You can browse and copy the HTML code for any glyph into an HTML editor.

But here’s my absolute favorite:

• Have you ever had a character in a font that you wish looked different? For example, a heart in Zapf Dingbats, but you wonder if there are any other hearts available in other fonts?

Or maybe you need a BIG question mark for a headline… Font Examiner takes you to the characters in other fonts that match your current character. Yeah baby, that’s a feature I can use!

Font Examiner 3 costs $20 and is only available for Mac OS X.

Chank Diesel’s Go Font Yourself

They’re terrific for implying a personality type when presenting handwritten text, or you may even find one that’s similar to your own handwriting and you can then use it to represent yourself in printed materials.

The website has a downloadable, 22-page specimen to examine.

Price: $69.

They include Aegean, Egyptian, and Akkadian collections, with ancient Greek and Roman symbols, Phaistos Disc, Lycian, Carian, Old Italic, Ugaritic, Old Persian, Linear A, Cypriot Syllabary, Lydian, Phoenician, Meroitic, Cuneiform, Anatolian Hieroglyphs, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Cypro-Minoan, and Cretan Hieroglyphs.

The collection also includes Byzantine Musical Symbols, Western Musical Symbols, Archaic Greek Musical Notation, Symbol Blocks, and more. Get them at, Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts.