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FONTS ARE LIKE baseball cards. They're fun to collect and examine, but they can be a pain to manage. We often remember what fonts look like, but not what they are named. A font tool should help you find what you are looking for quickly. Unfortunately, finding the perfect font in a folder of thousands is often overly difficult.
Veenix Software's Design & Type Tools helps you work with typefaces on your Mac. The tool collection centers around a window called the Font List that helps you search visually by showing each font as you would see it, not as a name-only list like in Apple's Font Book. The Font List also shows the font "type": True Type, PostScript, OpenType and Apple dFont format. Its Show menu is pretty cool, as it lets you tag your fonts with categories. Sadly, tagged categories are not applied back to the Font palette that you see in apps such as Text Edit and Pages when you press Command-T.
Double click any font in the Font List, and its entire character set will open, often revealing characters you've never seen. This is especially handy for ornament or dingbat fonts. The Font Measurement tool basically details a font's sizes for ascent, descent and baseline. Font Comparison quickly compares different fonts just by clicking them. Let's say you need a specific looking number 4 and lowercase g. You just type 4g, set the size and then click away at different fonts.
Opening the Font Sample window shows the font in upper and lower case, a sample word and a paragraph of Greek text. The background color and the font color can be changed in this window along with the size of the displayed type. Click any other font in the Font List to see it in the Font Sample window. You can also launch a font Slide Show, which is an intriguing feature, but we'd prefer color, background color and size controls here, as well.
Long ago we collected books that listed fonts and their names. Now that we've started collecting fonts on the web, those books do us little good. However, with Design & Type Tools, we can print our own custom books with a command called Print Type Book, which prints up to ten fonts per page for all of your installed fonts.
As a font manager, Type Tools can't turn on/off fonts after they have been installed in the system, so that job becomes a manual task. Type Tools makes it slightly easier if you select Reveal Selected Font from the Font List. Once revealed in the Finder, you have to drag the font out of its folder or delete it to deactivate it. It's much easier to use Font Book for this task.
The Design aspect of Design & Type Tools comprises some marginally useful design calculators, a graphics converter, a screenshot helper, a color grabber and a tool that helps you pick colors. The odd Reference menu includes an ASCII chart, a prepress checklist and Quick Web Search Tools that search for fonts, stock photos, news, supplier info and more. Then there's the App Services menu, and it's a mystery why that is even there. Veenix also sells Type Tools 2.2 with the design tools for $10 less, but buying Design & Type Tools may be a deal just for its Color Explorer alone, as Digital Anarchy's Color Theory costs $50 by itself (www.digitalanarchy.com).
However, the implementation of all of these tools and features was confusing overall. The design tools and the type tools share the same menus, which was bemusing, as were the layout of the program and some of its features. We can see Design & Type Tools coming in handy for some day-to-day tasks, but it needs better organization to clarify its operation.
–JOHN FOSTER
Design & Type Tools 5.2: 
Veenix | www.veenix.com | $50 (single user)
Pros: Fast access to type, prints font specimens.
Cons: Confused feature set, not really a font "manager," not really a "design" tool.
Requires: OS 10.2 or higher (optimized for OS 10.4 Tiger)
macHOME recommends: Spending time learning manual font management
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