“Are you buried in fonts? Are you tired of scrolling through an endless font menu, waiting impatiently for Zapf Dingbats to appear?” asks the Fontina documentation. “If so, Fontina can make all your favorite software more productive.” Fontina’s press release notes that it “improves font menus in almost all Macintosh programs.” I can’t really agree with either.
Fontina is a slick little CDEV that makes every font currently installed in your system show up on the screen at once so you don’t have to scroll (and scroll and scroll) through your font menu. It additionally groups your fonts alphabetically by family rather than by their true names — thus Helvetica Narrow comes right after Helvetica (rather than being listed as N Helvetica Narrow and showing up after Monaco). Because Fontina is a CDEV, it’s simple to install (just drag it into your System Folder and restart), and it’s simple to use. Selecting it in your Control Panel gives you access to a few things you can control about Fontina (see Figure 1). You can choose the size and font you want your menu displayed in, whether or not it shows you an example of each font as you choose it, and whether or not it organizes your fonts by family.
Fontina is pretty good at organizing your fonts, but certainly isn’t perfect. For example, look at the top of the third column in Figure 2: every type of Helvetica is put in alphabetical order instead of having them ordered “C Helvetica Condensed”, “CL Helvetica Condensed Light”, “Helvetica”, “L Helvetica Light”, and “N Helvetica Narrow”, all spread out throughout the menu — that’s great. It doesn’t understand how the Stone families are supposed to be grouped, however: Figure 2 shows “2StoneSans Bold” at the beginning of the menu (since a “2” is ASCII-alphabetically before the letter “A”) and “Stone Sans” down at the end of the menu (alphabetically organized under the letter “S”) where it belongs. Obviously, however, these two should be together. The font utility I most commonly use is Adobe Type Reunion — and it understands where they belong (see Figure 3). Type Reunion additionally groups each member of the family by weight (Regular, Semibold, then Bold) instead of alphabetically — much more useful, in my opinion. Of course, with Type Reunion, I still have to scroll a great deal (though not nearly as much).
Another problem with Fontina is its very claim to fame: because it puts all your fonts on one screen, you’ll have a hard time telling which font is which if you have many. Figure 4 shows my normal load of fonts using Fontina’s option of 10-point type (9-point is simply too hard to read). While I can use this, I find it considerably more difficult than just using Type Reunion.
One last problem with Fontina: it doesn’t store a bitmap of all your fonts anywhere and so if you have “Show samples” turned on and you use Adobe Type Manager (and almost everyone should be…), you have to wait while each and every font is created as you skip from one to another. It’s certainly handy to have them displayed for you, but unless you’re casually looking through your list, trying to decide on a font, it’ll simply slow you down too much (you can see the example font in the upper right-hand corner of Figures 2 and 4). Type Reunion allows you the option of seeing samples of your fonts by simply pressing [shift] and [option] while selecting the font menu (although because it doesn’t save bitmap samples, it spends a great deal of time with ATM as well).
Fontina retails for $69.95 but you can get it through companies such as MacWarehouse for just $45. For the same amount you can get Adobe Type Reunion, which, for my money, is a much better deal. The best of both worlds, however, would be a program that combines the two — all of the base fonts show on one screen (like Fontina) and each member of that family shows up in a pop-up menu (like Type Reunion). I did try both at the same time, of course — Fontina just rode over Type Reunion like it wasn’t there.
Overall, I’d say don’t get Fontina: whether you only have a few fonts or many, Type Reunion simply works better.
