One of the major issues faced by those who work in graphic design is managing installed fonts. Scrolling to the end of a list of dozens of fonts and not finding the one you know you installed a few months ago can be at minimum rather annoying. To solve this problem, there are programs that let you view your font collection, organize them into folders, and even install them temporarily while you use them. Among them, AMP Font Viewer is the best free option for Windows for all of these tasks.
The problem with accumulating too many installed fonts
Windows collects all the fonts you install in the folder C:/Windows/Fonts, from which your various editing and design programs get the list to display on their own interfaces. This results in two main annoyances: it gets complicated to find a particular font when you’ve topped more than a hundred or so and it slows down your computer when you try to load all of them.
There are various paid solutions you can use to catalogue your collection; however, the few free options out there let you view your fonts, but not manage them. Luckily, the tool I’m about to introduce to you gets you around both of those restrictions.
AMP Font Viewer: The answer to your problems
To start with, the program is a comprehensive font viewer, where you can view in just one step a huge number of fonts thanks to the program’s preview system. In addition, you can access a font and look over all of its features, from its formatting to the subfamilies that come along with it (bold, italic…).
But the real potential of AMP Font Viewer lies in its organizational capacity, since it allows you to organize your fonts into subfolders, thus making the process of cataloguing them more intuitive; not to mention the option to download fonts from a different folder from the one Windows uses by default. And best of all, it can download fonts for temporary use that will automatically be uninstalled when you close the app, which is ideal if you frequently work with design tools and don’t want to accumulate downloaded fonts that you’re not likely to ever need to use more than once.
As the only technical requirement, since it modifies the preset system options, the program creator’s webpage recommends you activate Administrator mode in the program’s executable file. (Right click > Run as Administrator, or Properties > Compatibility > Run this program as Administrator).
