As a part-time designer, I love installing and using new fonts all the time. However, with the plethora of fonts available online, this can quickly become quite out of hand, and before you know it, you’re sitting with a computer with well over 5000 fonts installed on it! Needless to say, this has quite a negative impact on your machine’s performance, particularly when it comes to booting up graphics applications like Adobe PhotoShop and GIMP, all of which need to load up the entire list of fonts before starting up.
Now restoring your Windows XP or Vista installation to the original set of installed fonts turns out not to be a particularly easy manual task, based on the way in which font handling and manipulation is executed on the Windows Explorer platform.
So enter FontFrenzy, an aptly named application from a not so aptly named software development group, namely Sound Doctrine Ministries (under the leadership of a great big bearded man called Timothy Williams).
FontFrenzy essentially allows you to strip away all your excess fonts and restores your system to Windows essential fonts only, all with the click of a friendly big button labelled “Defrenzy”.
What it does is simply save a snapshot of your current font set up and then move all extraneous fonts into a separate system folder, which you can then use at a later stage to restore fonts from. It’s simple interface allows you to add and remove fonts based on your saved snapshots, view font lists in any point-size using a customizable test phrases, view font samples in both upper- and lowercase characters and numerals, and just manage your system’s fonts in general.
Ture, it doesn’t have the most modern of interfaces, or perhaps the most polished of looks, but FontFrenzy is free to download and use, does the job extraordinarily well and most importantly of all, has given me back PhotoShop and GIMP by quickly and efficiently stripping out all those non-essential fonts I was bloating my system with, all with the click of a single button!
And I liked that! :)
Related Link: http://sdsoftware.org/default.asp?id=5929
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