Typograf Review Review
Poorly designed but snappy and stable
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You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Stable and responsive compared to other Windows font managers
Counter-intuitive, poor quality font previews in font management area, ugly UI
For some, the fonts included in Windows are all that's needed. Others, in particular graphic designers and the like, can often have muliple thousands of fonts to sift through, and having these fonts all installed at the same time can be a pain. That's where font management software like Typograf comes in.
As a user of Mac OS X's Font Book, I was disappointed with my first impressions of Typograf's less than impressive UI. Despite using the latest version of Windows, the buttons and other controls still look like Windows 95. A full screen of font previews in columns which can be scrolled through horizontally fills the main window; scrolling feels slow, clunky and unresponsive with the mouse, and only marginally better with the keyboard. Furthermore, the fonts displayed in the main window can only be selected by folder.
The meat of this program hides beneath a button in the toolbar labelled "Font Management". This brings up a secondary modal window, containing a single toolbar with ambiguous, unlabeled buttons. Everything about this window is counterintuitive and difficult to use. For example, to create a new font group and add fonts from a folder on disk to it, one must right-click "Database" and add a new 'folder', then click the CD icon (not the folder one as some users might have thought).
Importing the fonts is relatively easy compared to some of Typograf's competitors; it handles well over 1000 fonts in a single database 'folder' in a single import, and does not become unresponsive or crash during this process. One caveat, however, is the default preview is generated on import has the text "Hamburg", and is used as the font name in one view mode, so this must be changed to the "" option. Once fonts are loaded into the database, the only way to view them is a small, poor-quality, jagged preview, making it impossible to even distinguish some fonts. There is also no way to browse through font families as in Typograf's Macintosh equivalents. On the other hand, due to the pre-generated previews scrolling through is much snappier than other programs (or, for that matter, Typograf's main window).
Despite a poorly-designed UI, Typograf is faster and stabler than its competitors. However, jagged previews in font management make the fonts themselves difficult to sort, and may prove a dealbreaker.