Tools Of The Trade Part 2: Hi-Logic MainType

Written on June 30, 2006 – 3:26 pm | by sascha |

MainType is a relatively new font managing tool (for Win only) that puts Extensis Suitcase to shame! I’ve been trying Suitcase for a while but finding and activating fonts with it was a major pain in the butt. You had to dig around in the preview list on the right and then to activate the font you once again had to search for the same font in the left side list (all with no mousewheel support).

After I was fed up with Suitcase I went with OT1 fontmanager for quite a while but this manager, while a crapload better than Suitcase, runs a bit unstable and doesn’t support some important formats. It also can only install/uninstall fonts but not activate them temporarily. There are also a ton of other font managing tools out there but almost all I’ve came across so far didn’t fulfill my requirements.

These frustrating times are over with MainType! It supports all the common font formats like TrueType, OpenType, Postscript Type 1, Vector and Raster fonts, it has a clean and customizable GUI, it has font groups, fonts can be either installed/uninstalled or only activated temporarily (which is very useful when working on projects that require several fonts to be active, just make a new font group for that project and activate that bunch of fonts for this project), preview text can be changed, theres a palette with the character set, fonts can be stored anywhere on the harddisk etc. etc.

If you fell into despair so far because of the lack of a good font manager then I recommend to give MainType a try. I’m currently using the trial and when it comes to managing fonts on your system this seems to be the best choice currently (unless you prove me wrong and there is an even better tool that slipped my attention).

  1. 4 Responses to “Tools Of The Trade Part 2: Hi-Logic MainType”

  2. By NekNo Gravatar on Jul 20, 2006 | Reply

    Thanks a lot! Currently I use suitcase but don’t like it too much due to the reasons you’ve mentioned in your post. I’ll try MainType.

  3. By Chris CharltonNo Gravatar on Jul 26, 2006 | Reply

    Looks really good. I like.

  4. By NickNo Gravatar on Feb 10, 2007 | Reply

    I could not agree more, I’ve been sick of Suitcase for so long but every alternative I’ve tried has been flawed in one way or the other. This is what I’ve been waiting for. Excellence.

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