Finding the best things to integrate into a personal or business-related project is what most of us look for and, if text is involved, then choosing the most appropriate fonts is a must. This task, however, can prove daunting if your library contains hundreds of typefaces. To meet the challenge, you will have to enroll the service of a dedicated viewer that can help you pick out the fonts you consider befitting for the job. Sure enough, the application you're after has to work fast and efficiently, while allowing you an effortless operation. As there are enough such tools for you to select from, it's mainly a matter of personal taste in deciding for a piece of software or another.
An interesting and very likely candidate that meets all the requirements for this kind of utility is sFont, a freeware app designed exactly for this purpose: that of assisting you in making the right choice with no fuss and with a little bit of style. The package is lightweight, under 1 MB, and the installation smooth, just like the interface you'll be meeting. The looks score the first points and the works will reveal more benefits for you, all of them preserving the simplicity without cutting out the quality.
The main window is divided into two areas, one for the list of typefaces and the other dedicated to the preview. There are also several modules in both panels that are designed to ease the navigation, selection and visualization of the characters. On the left side, you can look at and browse through the entire list of installed fonts, but you can just as well create and then display a set of favorites from the second available column. The latter is done by right-clicking an item and adding it to the Favorites category. The right area of the application's interface is where you will be able to take a closer look at all the letters and symbols from the View, CharMap and Zoom tab.
sFont also offers you various fine-tuning options that help you refine the view mode. Thus, you can opt for having all the fonts shown in the list, only the TrueType or all but the TrueType. Another customization available is the size of the characters in the preview window alongside the emphasis for the typefaces that can be Bold, Italic, Underline or Strikeout. When in the CharMap section of the software, you will see at the bottom a tray where the symbols you pick will be sent. This module comes with a Copy function for sending to clipboard the selection and gives you supplementary information about the font name, character key and charset. If more encodings are available, you can activate the one you want from the right-click menu.
Another useful feature of this tool is that it will let you type a text of your choice in the View area, so you can see exactly how the active font will look onto your documents. To aid you in editing the selections you make, there are some handy commands waiting to be used in the dedicated menu of the application. In case you need to take a really close look at a specific typeface, you can do so in the Zoom pane of the software. It's also worth mentioning the fact that, in all these tabs designed for previewing the symbols and letters, there is the possibility to change the color scheme by adjusting the font and background colors. This can be very useful in order to highlight the choices and identify some particular elements from any font you single out.
The performance parameters of this utility are quite telling, as it loads very quickly massive amounts of characters. To be more specific, a list with more than two hundred fonts was scanned and shown in a matter of seconds. All this is done with a minimal use of resources, as noted during our testing. Thusly, the recorded values were under 8 % for processor usage and just over 3 MB of RAM were put to work, so the footprint of the software on the system can be considered rather light.
The Good
sFont scores high marks in all the areas, as it offers an excellent package that will help anyone browse and choose the fonts needed for a specific project, since it's also very easy to work with. The looks are great for this type of application, the features spot-on and, with a price tag that says ''Free,'' it's hard to expect and ask for more.
The Bad
Because it did all it was supposed to do without hitches or glitches, but instead fast and with style, there were no noticeable shortcomings, maybe a lack in offline help and documentation, but, given the user-friendly GUI and the function set, this can be easily overlooked.
The Truth
Insofar as the font viewers are concerned, I'm pretty sure I'll stick with sFont for a while, because it simply offers all the needed options wrapped in a nice-looking interface, fast processing, low-resource usage, to put it in three words: it simply works.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
Senin, 23 November 2009
For you that like style
