Fontmatrix Help

Importing Fonts

The very first thing to do once you have Fontmatrix up and running is to import fonts that you want to manage with Fontmatrix.
Use Import... option from File menu. Navigate until you find a directory containing your fonts - as a facility, it will recurse one time over directories. Once there are imported, the fonts are not activated by default.

Fontmatrix window is divided in two major parts. On the left side there are Font listing and Preview tabs, while right part contains various informations, logically separated into Info, Sample text, Glyphs and Tags tabs.

Browsing The Font List

Navigating through the list is simplified by multiple lavels of deepness:
the first letter of font typeface, full typeface name and the deepest level - the variant. On the last two lavels fonts can be activated. Enabling typefaces is done by clicking on checkbox in front of name. More demanding users can enable on the lowest level, the variant.
Selected item is automatically synchronized with preview tab, framing the preview, and opposite direction. Tabbing keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Space
Additional helpers are bottommost buttons 'View all' and 'View activated' which are pretty self explainary.

When you finally get familiar with your collection of fonts you can use Search mechanism to find exactly what you need. Search can be case sensitive, for which the option is provided.
The main reason this program is called font manager are it's most powerful features tagging fonts and organizing tags into collections for specific use. More on that is to come later.

Presenting Font to User

Fontmatrix is able to give verbose informations about imported font. There are basicly three kind of informations this font manager can provide:

Managing The Collection

Understanding tags and tagsets concept is crucial at this point.
Tags are basicly user defined attributes that can be assigned to a font, while TagSets are a collections of those attributes.

Tag can be anything you want. Good example would be 'book' for typefaces suitable for book text layout and 'header' for chapter nemes of the same book.

Following the same example, ideal TagSet would be 'Name of the book' which would be nothing more then union of typefaces/fonts 'book' and 'header' tags include. Bare in mind that any of tags can belong to more then one TagSet at a time.

Adding Tags

Select a font from font list on the left and switch to Tags tab on the left. Now you're able to write a Tag's name and add it pressing 'Add tag' button. Although tag appeared in tag list it's not assigned to any font by default. This must be done manually by clicking in check box in front of a tag. To offer a great frexibility, Fontmatrix can assign multiple tags to one font.

Managing TagSets

Bring TagSet editor to the front. You can access it through menu Edit and selecting Tag Sets item.
FINISH LATER!