FontUtensil Beta .9

Why suddenly make a utility?

FontUtensil started as an educational project and quickly turned into something that I could see myself using fairly often, because I'm too cheap (and not a graphic artist) too pay more than nothing for a font utility. I had a particular need that none of the current font utilities filled, namely the ability to quickly decide on a font for a project without endlessly scrolling through a billion menus only to forget what the name of the font was that I wanted to use… Let's be clear here though- I am not a graphic designer, nor do I claim to be, and FontUtensil is not designed with the designer in mind- it doesn't do font repair (yet), it doesn't give you tons of info about the fonts (yet), and it probably will be laughed at by the typographers in the audience, but I didn't design it for them…

Features that (I believe) set FontUtensil apart from every other font utility

Firstly, being a game designer, I don't always use "safe" fonts that would satisfy the editorial staff at the New Yorker… No, instead I sometimes need a medieval typeface, or something that conveys "wacky", or a single word in three different sizes and 5 different colors. So I gave FontUtensil the ability to "lock" a piece of formatted text into place- Now I can compare and match an "ojiferous" against different M's.
Secondly, I may be good at visualizing something, but black text on a white background doesn't always give me a good feel for what I'm doing (which has been the main drawback of using something like Font Book,) so I built in the ability to load a background picture, set a type origin, and compare my ever-expanding font catalogue against the image that I'm actually working with.
Thirdly, I plan on keeping this project free, so that cheapskates like me can benefit from a (hopefully) useful utility program for the Mac- there's never enough freeware or Open Source software!

What can I do to help?

Email me and let me know what kind of features you'd like to see or what kind of bugs you encounter.