This chapter explains the very basic things about font managers, Fontmatrix and fonts. If you don't know whether Fontmatrix is of any use to you, or you need to clear up one or two things about fonts, you are exactly the person we wrote it for.
This question pops up every now and then. Really, why? Aren't people just happy with what they've got? Isn't installing and removing fonts the usual way good enough? There are several reasons.
Designers working under contract are doomed to use a variety of fonts, because every client has his or her own preferences and ideas about what suits a particular task.
So we are talking here about collections of fonts that are as large as 3,000 or 5,000 fonts: decorative freeware fonts, licensed fonts, very expensive licensed font families with over 20 faces, and so on. Keeping all of them loaded in the system is likely to slow it down and make browsing through font lists very tedious. Which means you need some tool to activate and deactivate fonts selectively.
What else? Searching. If you have over a thousand fonts you need to be able to find the one you need quickly given that usually you have only a basic idea of what you need. So you want to compare them: type in some text and see how all candidates render this text, then pick the one that suits the job best.
How about grouping some fonts? Think of branding projects: you create a whole package — website, brochures, business cards — and use a fixed set of fonts. At any time you have to be able to quickly enable these fonts in the system to create a new brochure or a new bunch of business cards for this client. Font managers help you here through a tagging system.
If you work for a font foundry, your job is to promote fonts. The most convenient way is to create a so called font book — an album displaying how the same text is rendered with several fonts. You filter the whole collection to select just the fonts you want and in a few clicks you have a PDF file ready to be uploaded or printed.
And the last bit. If you ever used complex design software, you know that sometimes it finds a corrupt font and refuses to work. Font managers often have built-in font validation tools that help to find problematic fonts and deactivate them temporarily.