When recording the August 27th podcast of Design Tools Weekly, I answered a question I frequently hear from Mac users:

“How do I make the Fonts menu in QuarkXPress show fonts in their own typefaces — you know, WYSIWYG?”

Here’s what I suggest:
While you’re waiting for Quark to add this feature to QuarkXPress, spend $17 on Unsanity’s Font Card.

That’s right: FontCard makes the Font menu in every application show fonts in their own typefaces. But there’s a second feature that I love almost as much: it groups recently used fonts in at the top of the Font menu. I mean seriously, 99% of the time aren’t you reaching for a font you’ve recently used?

But wait, there’s more! It can also reach into font sets you’ve created in third-party font managers (Suitcase, FontAgent or FontExplorer) and show previews of inactive fonts in those font managers.

And it adds several other helpful features: you can reveal the actual font file on your hard drive for any font in the menu; each font in the list is marked with an icon that indicates its format (PostScript, TrueType or OpenType); it groups font families into submenus; it marks duplicate fonts; and you can create your own custom font sets in the font menu.

In addition… if you hold down the Shift key, the fonts appear in a simple, unstyled list, which is helpful because sometimes you don’t need to see the fonts in their own styles, because you simply want to choose a font you already know.

Yes, QuarkXPress should already be able to show fonts in their own typefaces. But then if it did, we probably wouldn’t bother getting FontCard — and we’d miss out on its other fantastic font menu enhancements.

Jay Nelson

Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.