MainType 2.1 • High-Logic
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It is all too easy to accumulate hundreds or thousands of fonts just by installing a few software applications. Having too many fonts installed not only slows down the system, it slows you down every time you need to select a font from a long list.

If you have more than a few hundred fonts installed you may benefit from using a font manager. MainType is a powerful font manager for Windows that makes it easy to keep your fonts organised.

You can sort your fonts, organise them into groups, and install or uninstall them easily. If you need some fonts just for the current print job, you can load the font temporarily and it will be gone the next time you reboot.

    Contents

    1. New Features in ver 2.1
    2. Key Features
    3. Layouts
    4. Wide-screen Layouts
    5. Filtering Fonts
    6. Font Catalogues

    New Features in ver 2.1

    • Instant Zoom character popup window in character pane
    • Type preview text into Font pane dropdown list
    • More predefined font variables
    • Use ALT-<character code> to insert characters into the Sample pane
    • Colours in samples and zoom pane, row striping in font lists
    • After the trial period MainType will continue to run, but in restricted mode

    Features from ver 2.0

    • Enhanced print options
    • Improved font export
    • Several performance improvements
    • Added browse favourites
    • Numerous other minor enhancements
    • Search by Unicode Character code point
    • More Layout features improves usability
    • Keyboard shortcuts to Layout configurations
    • More font information (Unicode ranges, tables, etc.)

    The most significant new feature for me is the Shortcut Keys for switching layouts. Shortcuts from Control 1 to Control 6 switch between the four default layouts and the two customized layouts that can be saved.

    Key Features

    • Install, uninstall, load and unload fonts
    • Preview and browse fonts on any drive or directory without installation
    • Full Unicode support
    • Character grid with Unicode block navigation
    • Print and print preview your fonts
    • Support all popular font formats and more: TrueType, OpenType, Postscript Type 1, Vector and Raster fonts
    • Move, copy, rename and delete fonts
    • Full drag and drop support
    • Insert character to background application
    • Font export wizard generates an HTML based overview of all your fonts

    Layouts

    Sample Layout

    There are four layouts for different tasks, and you can save two more customized layouts of your own. The Font Information layout is illustrated above in a reduced window to suit this web page. The default layout shows all five panes: Fonts, Characters, Information, Sample, and Zoom (single character). All five panes or toolbars are shown in the wide-screen layout illustrated below.

    • The Fonts Pane lists installed fonts, browses uninstalled fonts, and lists font groups. Use this pane to organise your fonts, to install and uninstall fonts, or load and unload individual fonts or entire groups of fonts.
    • The Characters Pane lists all of the characters in the selected font, organized into Unicode character sets. Use this pane to browse the selected font. Use the Find function to search for a particular character by name.
    • The Information Pane lists details of the selected font: Names, File properties , Panose classification, Metrics, Vendor, Designer, License, and Links.
    • The Sample Pane previews a sample of the font at the size you choose. You can add your own text samples and switch between them.
    • The Zoom pane previews a single character with its name and Unicode number

    With two clicks you can change the layout to suit the current task, or manually resize and rearrange the panes, before saving your own customized layout. The program remembers the current layout when you exit, and loads it at start up.

    Wide-Screen Layouts

    On wide monitors you can get additional layouts by restoring the MainType window and then detaching a few toolbars. These can be saved from the Layout dialogue, and restored easily by selecting “Custom layout 1” or “Custom layout 2” from the layout dialogue box. Below is a sample wide-screen layout, scaled down to fit this web page.
    Wide-screen layout

    Filtering Fonts

    MainType allows you to filter and sort your fonts in many different ways. Find fonts below a certain weight, or containing more than a specified number of glyphs.

    The five panes and two toolbars can be rearranged. Drag and drop support helps you quickly organize your fonts into groups. If you have already organized your fonts into subdirectories, these will become groups automatically.

    The character grid shows all available characters in each font grouped into Unicode blocks. The browse buttons and character set droplist on the Character Pane let you browse even the largest of Unicode fonts quickly.

    The flexible print options (with a print preview) lets you design detailed sample sheets of your font collection — you can even edit the HTML templates to design your own layouts. The export wizard can output font details to the clipboard, rich text files, or as HTML for viewing in a browser.

    Individual characters can be pasted to a background application as text, enabling you to use MainType to insert special characters into your documents or emails. They can also be copied to the clipboard as graphics.

    Perfect Office FontsFont Catalogues

    The Export Font Information wizard offers several different options for producing font catalogues. Having selected fonts or folders of fonts in the browse window or the installed fonts window you can export an HTML or Rich text format font catalogue, or just a plain text list of the font names. This HTML catalogue is a list of the Bitstream fonts that came with Perfect Office some years ago.