Whether you are a graphic designer, typographer, or a casual user, you'll benefit from better management of your fonts. Experimenting with fonts, downloading free fonts, and purchasing new fonts all contribute to a growing collection and, before you know it, you have more fonts than you know what to do with. Even without the potential for confusion, all of these fonts can drain your computer's resources-in short, you need a solution to manage your collection.

Depending on the type of user you are, the features that you need will vary. Casual users will be satisfied with a font manager that allows them to perform basic management steps such as previewing fonts and installing and un-installing them with ease. The professional user will want greater control and features, such as detecting and repairing corrupt fonts, missing fonts, duplicate fonts, and PostScript errors. In addition, the ability to deactivate unneeded fonts will help your computer perform better if it has an extensive collection of fonts installed. Also, font managers with server-enabled versions are ideal for a networked environment.

You can see a list of installed fonts in Microsoft Windows by going to the Control Panel and choosing Fonts.

The Fonts section of the Control panel provides only limited functionality; you can view a list of installed fonts, preview fonts, and add and remove fonts. To preview a font, simply double-click it, and a new window will open showing samples of the font in various sizes.

For Windows Vista users, accessing the Fonts section is slightly different-go directly to the Control Panel and type Font into the Search box to immediately get a link to the Fonts folder, with sub-links such as Install or remove a font and View installed fonts. Or of course, you can choose Classic view and then click on the Fonts icon to manage your fonts as you did in Windows XP.

Macs also come with basic built-in font management tool. For Mac users with OS X 10.3 and above, the Font Book tool comes standard. It allows you to preview and install fonts, group fonts into collections, activate or deactivate fonts and collections, check the integrity of font files, and export collections to be used on other computers. OS X also comes with Font Panel, a tool that you can use from within applications to select and group fonts, and style your text.

OS X also allows you to store your fonts in four locations. You can store your fonts in the system fonts folder (/System/Library/Fonts, for Mac system fonts), the local fonts folder (/Library/Fonts), user fonts folder (~/Library/Fonts), and if you're on a managed network, your Mac will find fonts in the network fonts folder, as well. This allows greater flexibility for Macintosh users, especially on a shared system or network.

Free and shareware programs are plentiful, with offerings from bare-bones viewers to sophisticated management utilities. In many cases, free means free forever, but in the case of shareware, it can mean free for a trial period, or free but with limited functionality. Pay attention to the details before downloading.

Professional users such as graphic designers and typographers need higher-end tools with advanced features for managing their collections.

Choosing the tool that's best for you requires some research, but it will be time well spent. Look for tools that give you reliable results, provide font management features that you need, eliminate conflicts, sniff out corruption, and take the guesswork out of working with your fonts by providing you with detailed information.

Make sure the font management tool you are considering is compatible with your favorite graphics software programs, too. If you mainly work with Adobe Illustrator, but your font management tool doesn't support it, it may be of little use to you in your day-to-day operations.