Font Pilot plunges into your system and digs up the dirt on your fonts. Copyrights, licenses, descriptions, PostScript names, file sizes, locations, and so much more! However, Font Pilot would have hardly graduated flight school if it did. Choosing the right font for a project is essential when it comes to its presentation. We've all seen those cheesy used car commercials using a messy font like "Sand". Don't let that happen to you! Take control of your font collection. In the old days, before Font Pilot, you'd be stuck manually installing one font at a time and relaunching your programs until you found the one you liked. Not anymore! Using its superior font management engine, Font Pilot plunges into your system and digs up the dirt on your fonts. Copyrights, licenses, descriptions, postscript names, file sizes, locations, and so much more! However, Font Pilot would have hardly graduated flight school if it didn't go above and beyond its other classmates. Font Pilot allows you to browse an entire folder of fonts that are NOT installed with a visual preview! While viewing the slideshow, click the Install button at any time to have that font permanently installed and activated on the computer. No fuss, no gimmicks, just pure functionality. Also activate (without installing) fonts on the fly! Amongst these great features, and numerous others like the character map, key combo list, and print engine. Font Pilot is an essential font management software tool in any graphic designer's repertoire. Give it the free fifteen day trial, and we're sure you'll find it hard to let go!
What's new in Font Pilot
Version 2.5.2:
Bug Fix: Now give precedence to English language values when loading a FontRecord
Enhancement: Changed notification type that gets sent when fonts are installed
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While what the developer says might be true about Apple's Font Book. he fails to mention that Linotype Font Explorer does most of this and for free. Additionally Font Explorer does things that this product does not do. In order to make an informed decision I would suggest taking a look at Font Explorer when considering the purchase of this product. Please note that this is a comment on value, not on quality or performance of this product.
While your response is useful, You are only partially correct. The Pro version of Font Explorer is fee based. However the unsupported free version is still available in the downloads section. I am using it under Snow Leopard and it is still working fine for me.
While what the developer says might be true about Apple's Font Book. he fails to mention that Linotype Font Explorer does most of this and for free. Additionally Font Explorer does things that this product does not do. In order to make an informed decision I would suggest taking a look at Font Explorer when considering the purchase of this product. Please note that this is a comment on value, not on quality or performance of this product.
Font Book does NOT allow you to:
- View a character map with key combos
- View extra font data from the table, only the predefined 10 or so fields.
- Rename fonts in your fonts folder based on name
- Preview fonts in a slideshow-like format and pick and choose which ones to install
- Activate fonts in-place.
- Choose your own preview text and colors.
- View a Font waterfall
- View invisible fonts
- Show the Keyboard Viewer
- Print a list of your fonts in style
- View fonts by file instead of just by family
- View font Metrics
- Preview all your fonts at once in the main list
There have been a LOT of releases if the past few days of this product. I wish they would spend more time fixing bugs before pushing the product out to market.
Remember: Testing takes MORE time than Development.
So what does this do that the combination of Linotype Font Explorer(free) and FontBook at $10 do not do? I would encourage users to explore what these 2 utilities will do that Font Pilot does not. I hesitate to starting the listing since I believe it would be much too long to be considered a comment.
While it serves the entire Mac community to encourage software development and interest, it also is equally as serving to charge for their efforts only if the product meets or exceeds the following criteria:
- Does something better or a much more unique and user friendly way than the competition.
- Does something that no one else does
- Offers better value through more features and/or a lower price than the competition.
Otherwise the product serves the Mac Community in no way other to dilute a product need that is already filled and confuse the user.
While I would be the first to agree that W.C. Fields would take exception to my criteria ( i.e. "t's morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money."), rest assured, W.C. Fields never conceived of any kind of interest in the Mac Community, much less an ethical one. And in my opinion, neither do developers who subscribe to the ideology of Mr. Fields, who's numbers seem to be on the rise.
Programs such as MS Word and AppleWorks have the option of previewing fonts... but if I don't want to open them to view fonts, then I use Font Book. So why pay for this program?
About the only thing that I can find that this program does that the included Apple utilities do equally as well or better is print samples. That you can do in a couple of minutes with a little typing and some copying and pasting in TextEdit, saving yourself some money for more valuable and useful products.
Nice program, but the developer pissed me off when he changed it from Freeware to Shareware - basically 'cause he did it sneakily. He released a few updates, then day there was an 'update' which then asked you to register.
Luckily I've got the original Font Pilot v.1.0 which works fine. Not worth paying for though - you can find free font viewers such as: Font Insight X, Font Sampler & iLoveFonts on this site.
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