Using metadata to organize your fonts

The term “metadata” refers to information, or data, about data.

In the case of Connect Fonts, your fonts are data, and pieces of information about them—styles, foundry, and tags, among others—are the metadata.

You can use font metadata, whether it is built in or you add it yourself, to help organize your fonts, and keep them organized over time.

Families

Families are a built-in organizational tool in the Connect Fonts desktop app.

The term family refers to a group of related fonts that were designed to be used together. Fonts in a family will vary in weight, style, or width, but not in overall design.

Family information is not stored as part of the font itself, so Connect Fonts uses other pieces of font metadata (such as the font’s name, foundry, and format) to determine a font’s family.

The Connect Fonts desktop app allows you to display fonts in family groups or as stand-alone entries. When you enable family grouping (choose View > Group Fonts by Family), each family is grouped separately, with the family name displayed above the group.

Grouping fonts by family helps you identify at a glance whether a particular font is available in the weights and styles that you need for your project.

Learn more about Families.

Favorites

For a quick way to group fonts, click the Favorite icon for the desired fonts.

Your favorite fonts are instantly available; click the Favorite Fonts Smart Search (Smart Searches are grouped at the bottom of the collections pane).

QuickFind and sets

QuickFind can instantly identify fonts whose name or other criteria include the text you enter.

Say you wanted to find certain Helvetica fonts, then keep them together for a project.

Select the libraries that you want to search, then start typing helvetica in the QuickFind field in the toolbar.

The desktop app doesn’t wait for you to finish typing; it starts finding fonts as soon as you start typing, and quickly reduces the number of fonts displayed to match what you type.

When you have typed enough of your search text to narrow the search results, you can select the fonts that you are interested in and create a set. Choose File > New Set from Selection, then enter the name for the set.

Set names

When you name sets, you should have some goal in mind, and perhaps set a naming convention.

For example, you could use set names to identify projects, or clients, or to identify fonts by their usefulness.

You can even use multiple naming conventions; just be sure to use names like “Client: Cupcakes 4 All” or “Font Faves: Cool Dingbats.”

Advanced Find and Smart Searches

The Advanced Find feature can help you locate fonts matching multiple criteria.

Once you have found these fonts, you can create a Smart Search that you can use to immediately identify the fonts again.

Suppose you want quick access to all Garamond fonts in TrueType format.

1. Choose Edit > Find Fonts.

2. Click theSearch In pop-up menu and chooseAll.

   This will have Connect Fonts search in all your libraries.

3. In the Find pane, choose all from the pop-up menu in Choose fonts that match all of the following conditions.

   This will ensure that Connect Fonts finds only fonts that both have Garamond in their name and are TrueType format.

4. In the next row in the Find pane, click the first pop-up menu and choose Name.

   You could choose PostScript Name or Family Name and probably get the same results.

5. Click the second pop-up and choose contains.

6. In the field to the right, type Garamond.

   Searching is not case-sensitive so you don’t need to capitalize your search text.

7. At the far right of the Find pane, click + to add another search criterion.

8. In the next row, choose Type from the first pop-up, matches from the second, and TrueType from the third.

   The Fonts pane now lists all the fonts in all your libraries that match the search criteria.

9. Click Save to save the search as a Smart Search. Name it something appropriate, such as “Garamond TrueType”.

   Smart Searches are saved at the bottom of the collections pane.

The advantage of a Smart Search is that, no matter how your libraries change, the Smart Search will always display the fonts that match your criteria; you won’t need to re-create the search to find the matching fonts.

Tags

Tags are a key resource in font organization. A tag is a word or phrase that you associate with one or more fonts.

You can create tags that say anything that you want, and associate as many tags as you like with each font.

You can then use the search and set tools described earlier to organize your tagged fonts, or you can rely on tags to find fonts on the fly.

For details about adding and using tags, see Adding tags.