Managing fonts is a little boring area and there aren’t really any known and popular apps here. I had cycled through few of them over years until I had finally reached NexusFont.
What it does
Core of NexusFont is usual font viewer with font list and customizable preview. However it delivers excellent presentation by putting preview on every font in the list instead of looking through fonts one at a time. Together with incremental search and displaying non-installed fonts from any folder this makes everything very easy.
Don’t be too scared of screenshot, that’s merely my crappy handwriting I have around digitized since YourFonts review. :)
Strong features
Aside from core functions NexusFont is put together in style of small sub-utilities. It has:
- font install/uninstall with backup;
- internal charmap (as well as link to system one);
- export multiply fonts as image;
- flexible print of multiply fonts;
- font duplicates search.
Overall
Developers clearly wanted too take font experience further then usual and packed NexusFont full of powerful and handy functions. I can’t claim expert opinion if this app completely perfect for extensive font managing but it is definitely best I had tried while free and completely portable on top.
Home http://xiles.net/
Seems images search online really gets better
Real “E ink” book reader review
I like the look of this app but have been using fontpicker -> http://www.richardsprojects.co.uk/products/font-picker/
Adobe Air is required. I think the ability to uninstall / backup a font may make me move over to Nexus. Thanks Rarst.
@Jonny
I stay as far from Air as I can. That thing has no idea what Windows app should look like (focusing on crossplatform instead – which I don’t care about) and resource consumption is ugly.
Aesthetic and more functions than a plain Font viewer. A nice discovery, hello Rarst (I’m discovering your website via AppNews) and thanks.
@Transcontinental
Hi! Thanks for your comment and welcome to blog. :)
Have you had/heard of any issues with crashes with this software. I just tried it out and for the most part it’s pretty sweet. However, when I went to maximize my window it told me there wasn’t enough memory for that function and crashed. Also, I tried uninstalling a font and then looked in the uninstalled fonts folder and it wasn’t there. It also didn’t end up staying in the installed fonts folder. I had to go back and manually reinstall it.
@Ryan
Maximizing works just fine for me and I hadn’t any crashes so far.
When you uninstall fonts it gives you dialog asking do you want to delete font file/leave it/backup it. Maybe you clicked through too fast? Happens to me at times, damn mouse reflexes. :)
No problem of any type here and up to now, including maximizing.
One tip — if you click the “Download” button on the Lexus web site, you get an executable installer which requires Admin rights to install. (For people like me, who are working on locked-down computers, that won’t work.) But if you click the “Download Zip Version” link you get a Zip file you can just unzip straight to your USB drive (or wherever you like).
Thanks for the posting — this looks like just what I was looking for.
@PhilipS
Yeah, I always prefer no-instal/portable versions. Even if I rarely end up without admin rights. :)
Glad app fits your needs.
That was an inspiring post,
This is a great tool for managing your fonts… really useful
Thanks for writing, most people don’t bother.
Yeh ive been using this for my font’s, thanks for the post
You are welcome, glad it was of use. :)
Really useful tool especially the preview feature as noted – I couldn’t get the backup function to work at first but OK now.
@Rarst
Thank you friend, very nice posts.
portability is a big must for me these days. just what i needed, with preview. thank you
Hi,
I started to look after of things I have heard / seen in the past couple of years regarding windows performance. During the process I have read many interesting things about prefetch/superfetch, whether stopping unnecessary services increase performance or not, and stuff. Also found a great defrag tool that optimizes the disk by organizing system files to the beginning (fast disk access area) of the HDD.
However I haven’t found information about how will affect system performance if you have many fonts installed. I have Vista, most users use Win7. I’m not sure if many active fonts still slow down booting and the running system.
My hobby is desktop customization, that involves installing many fonts.
I have found NexusFont at xiles.net, that says, it autoactivates fonts when applications need them, but the fonts are not installed into the system, which makes it faster.
Do you have any experience whether this is still a topic to be taken care of, or vista/7 uses fonts differently?
cheers
szekelya
@szekelya
It is commonly believed that having too many fonts installed impacts performance. However I had never seen any information on either how many “too many” is or does it even matter for modern Windows versions and modern hardware.
You can try asking on http://superuser.com/ or around there.
I really like this program, but after using it for a day or two, it suddenly started crashing when I so much as touch it. Anyone else have a problem? WindowsXP
@Tracy Saritzky
I hadn’t used it in a while, but don’t think I ever had such issue.
Is there a maximum number of fonts, installed or just listed, that, when exceeded, can make the program crash? This is making me crazy as I am trying to minimize the number of fonts installed at one time to see if my computer runs faster, and this is the only program I can find that lets me put the same font in more than one category (using tags) and will also let me view multiple fonts at once to compare.
@Tracy Saritzky
No idea. Try emailing developer about your issue?