My faves for PC are OT1Font Manager, Font Xplorer. I have my fonts stored in an extensive folder directory structure, with about 20 to 30 categories of fonts, such as whimsical, dingbat, all caps titling, formal cursive, handwriting non-cursive, etc. I found it easier this way, when I was designing websites and logos for clients, to easily narrow in on a font type and generate speciments in less than an hour, without the client ever having to know the difference between slab-serif , monospaced, unicase or anything.
Fast forward to current life on the mac. I've mostly gotten over not being able to peruse my uninstalled fonts. I believe I might have found a program that showed font previews of uninstalled fonts, but it didn't generate type specimen sheets, didn't allow for any moving of the fonts between folders and subfolders, and was all around inferior to the couple of PC progam I already paid for and own. Linotype Explorer is a freeware program that does fairly well, but I ended up opting out of that after finding this app that I'm about to mention.
So I skipped that portion of the problem and insteaded focused on the easiest to solve: being able to instantly see a font specimen of an installed font. Enter Stone's Fontsight. This program adds a top level menu in most cocoa apps, such as pages, textedit, etc., that allows you to see the fonts installed, listed in their own fontstyle. Like such:
So, although Linotype Explorer allowed me to make font groups and uninstall and install them with 1 click as a group, it didn't work with Fontsight, which uses OSX-native Font Book groups. So if I made a group in FontBook, I can preview the group in the menu, which is VERY helpful when discriminating between several similar fonts. It's worth mentioning that Linotype FontExplorer is a kick-butt app in general. It does for free what Suitcase did for $100+ and a better job than that. There even might be a way I could get it to work with Fontsight, but the reason I switched to mac is that things are supposed to just work. So I stop myself from doing too much research and patching. If I spend all my time (I've spent enough) trying to research fixes to problems I've already found solutions to for my pc, I wasted my purchase money in buying this mac.
The Fontsight program costs a measly $19 with FREE LIFETIME UPDATES! This my friend, brings me to one thing I really like about the mac. A lot of apps are REALLY cheap. Whereas most PC apps, even shareware, starts at about $35, mac apps can go for as cheap as $12! (Not if they come from Apple: who on earth thought it was reasonable to jump from $0 for Iphoto to $299 for Aperture? Are we paying for the free Iphoto retroactively?)
So, if you like to know what your fonts look like ahead of time, I'd suggest you invest in a test run of Fontsight. The demo is very forgiving, so much so that I purchased it mostly to support such stand up work from a great developer. Some other apps on my 'to buy' list get waylaided if the demo is too short or too crippled. So check it out and tell me if you like it.
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