Shortcut to font equivalent on the Mac?

[typecase]

Hello all,

I'm a new Mac user (just switched) and was wondering if there is anything equivalent to having shortcuts to my fonts. On my PC I had a big fonts folder with everything neatly organized into subfolders based on foundry, etc. When I had to install a font, I simply pointed the shortcut to the font. Nothing was actually copied to the windows font folder. Can I do this with Mac OS X? If so, please tell me how. Any help appreciated. Thank you.

 

[chameeeleon]

I'm definitely not a Fonts expert my any means, and I didn't totally understand what you meant, but have you tried the app Font Book? It's sort of like iTunes for fonts. Definitely missing some stuff right now, but there's a new version coming with Tiger. Might be able to do what you want. It's in your Applications folder (and you can put it in the dock if you like it).

 

[mkrishnan]

(Edit: I was writing at the same time as Chameeleon but I guess there's enough of an expansion on what he/she said here that its worth not deleting it)

I am not sure about whether or not you can use shortcut or alias files in your font directory...I am almost certain you can, because the fonts directory (/library/fonts) is just a unix directory and setting up a virtual path reference is definitely doable in Unix. But I'll defer that to someone else.

But two other observations:

1) Take a look at the program Font Book in the utilities folder. It actually allows you to create "collections" to manage your fonts, which would go a long way towards keeping different sets of fonts you add separated. You can delete an entire collection en masse, etc.

2) Also, you'll notice in the prefs for font book that you can add fonts for a user only. Fonts actually go in two places in MacOS -- in the /library/fonts directory and in the ~/library/fonts directory -- that is, within your user home directory. So if you don't want fonts being installed in system areas, then you can install your fonts in your user directory as an alternative.

So between the two, you might be able to get what you want without resorting to links and aliases. That is, install your fonts within new collections that you create in font book, and install them for current user only, so they stay in your home directory and out of the system directories....

 

[typecase]

Thanks for the replies, guys. I'll check into Fontbook. Cheers!