If you're like most art directors and graphic designers, you've probably accumulated an unwieldy number of fonts in your Macintosh computer system. The font management method described below has three major benefits:

• Improves the speed of opening application software.
• Troubleshooting corrupt fonts is much easier.
• Makes it much easier to collect fonts when sending documents to service bureaus.

HOW TO

1. All your fonts should be placed in a folder called Font Library. Within the Font Library folder, create 26 individual folders naming them the letters Athrough Z.
2. Create a folder for each font your own. Place this font's screen and printer component pieces inside its folder.
3. Now distribute the font folders into the alphabetic "letter" folder where they belong. Fonts should be organized alphabetically by their typeface family, which is not necessarily the same as the full font name. For example, the font named Adobe Garamond should be placed inside the Gfolder, not the Afolder.
4. Do this for all your fonts.

EXAMPLE

• In this example, you would create a single screen font suitcase that contains the only the "Eras" font. Put this screen font suitcase inside its own folder called: Eras folder.
• Put each associated Eras printer font into the Eras folder.
• Put the Eras folder inside the "E" folder.

DAILY FONT OPERATIONS

It's not a good idea to have lots of fonts "open" at the same time. It puts too much of a strain on the computer's resources and causes your software applications to open very slowly. Therefore you should use either the Extensis Suitcase or Adobe Type Manager Deluxe or Font Reserve software package to open (and close) fonts only as needed.

Although there may be hundreds of fonts stored on your computer, you'll probably end up using the same few fonts over and over. I suggest you use a software utility to open these fonts as part of the Startup Set -- and then open other fonts only as needed.

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© 1997 Beato Enterprises Inc. May not be reprinted without permission.