Typograf Review Review

As a designer, i need a lot of control over my fonts, although it's one of the basic principles of design to not overuse to manny different fonts, we all end up having hundreds or maybe thousands of fonts.

To get a good overview of all these typefaces, we often print out fontbooks or even buy them. These books are expensive!. An other, maybe better solution is software to catalogue and view our fonts, and one of these pieces of software is A&m Neubers Typopraf.

At first glance thats how Typopraf looks, a very basic font manager with a Windows 98 look. The Win98 look stays for the entire experience but Typopraf is much more then a basic font manager. It gives you full control over your fonts on levels you didn't even realize you needed it.

Offcourse all the basics of a font manager are present. you got your basic preview window of your installed files, you can see previews of fonts inside other folders, you can group fonts, preview their keyboard layout, preview your own text strings, colors, sizes,...

But it is very clear that this piece of software is ment for so much more!

When you select a font and ask for it's properties, you get all the info you'll ever need! a lot of this info would seem to be overkill for the average pc user, but for any self respecting designer of typesetter this info is essential!

Besides your basic info like Font Family, Full Name and Style, you also get the Trademark and Copyright info. Most people ignore these when printing a letter of creating a folder, and some fonts like Times New Roman and Comic Sans allow this kind of use, but not all fonts, for fonts like Arial and Futura, you need to pay commissions to use them in your publication.

Another tab in the properties window is the Metric tab. This tab gives you important info like how much space the font is using on your harddrive. It gives you info about the class of the font and even detailed information about the license. It has all the Panose Classification information. Panose is a way of classifying fonts only on the way they look. It has info about the structure of the font and it even identifies linked fonts (like bold and italic variations).

The kerning tab is a dream for every designer and typesetter. It gives you detailed info about every special kerning-pair in the font. Kerning is the amount of white space in-between individual letters and letter-pairs. The default value of the letters is 0, but good fonts include kerningpairs wich do not have this default value, letter combinations like AT, PA, Wu,... have their own values. In a lot of cases we have to modify these pairs and to do that right, we have to know the default values, mostly done by trail and error, but not when we have the power of Typopraf.

The last tab gives you a basic charset, the ability to copy these and get the Anscii values.

Typopraf gives you the ability to compare fonts, and not just by viewing the one next to the other. You can let it screen your fonts and match fonts that go good togetter, you can do this for Font classes, Panose and even Metrics. You will never have an excuse again for badly mixed titles and paragraphs.

Last but certainly not least is the comprehensive typography documentaition included right in the software. It gives you detailed information about the history of fonts and fontclasses, how to correctly mix fonts and a basic typesetting layout.

Typopraf is a professional font management and information library which should be present in every designers and typesetters library of software. The donwfall of this is that its only available on Windows and not on Mac Os X.