Designers Guide to Mac OS X Tiger

Try as you might to avoid it, your Mac is destined to become a sort of halfway house for wayward fonts. Some will come from the applications you install. The Adobe Creative Suite, for example, installs a nice list of fonts. Others will come from clients proclaiming things like "I found this font on some Web site. I just love it!"

The problem is that your font collection will grow faster than you realize, and before long it will take on a life of its own. Compound that with the fact that many fonts can have the same name but not look exactly alike, and you can easily end up using the wrong font version in a client's document. As a result, the text reflows, everything looks wrong, and your client is very unhappy.

Dealing with your fonts and keeping them organized is fairly easy to do when you have the right tools. Armed with some basic font knowledge and a good font-management application, you'll be ready to handle all of your project's fonts.