Selecting fonts

In Typeface you’re collecting fonts instead of selecting. This allows you to pick candidates while you’re looking for the perfect font.

Quick collection

When you collect a font it is added to the Quick Collection, a temporary workspace for interesting fonts.

The Quick Collection is a more persistent implementation of selection. In most apps when you accidentally click outside of your selection, your current selection is reset. Because Typeface is focused on exploring fonts and marking candidates as you go, accidentally clearing your selection would be less than ideal. That’s why Typeface keeps your collection around until you explicitly clear it.

How does it work?

There are multiple ways to collect fonts:

Collect a range of fonts by holding the Shift key and clicking on the Quick Collect corner (or hold down Command + Shift and click on a font). Typeface will collect all fonts between the previously collected font and the current one.

Viewing the Quick Collection

Click the Quick Collection icon in the toolbar to view your collected fonts. Clicking the icon again will return to your previous view, so you can keep on exploring where you left off. You can also display the Quick Collection by using the keyboard shortcut Command + 0 (zero).

Targeting the Quick Collection (on drag/right click)

When you drag or right click on a collected font the other collected fonts are targeted as well. This allows you to tag or activate multiple fonts at once: collect them, then drag them to a tag in the sidebar. The targeted fonts will be highlighted with a black (or white in dark mode) outline.

If you want to drag a single font (family) instead, hold down the Command key. This works for the context menu as well: Command+right click to get the context menu for a single font (family). You can change this behavior in Settings, by adjusting the ‘Default Target’ setting.

Clearing the Quick Collection

If you want to start over and clear your currently collected fonts press and hold (or right click) on the Quick Collection icon in the toolbar and choose Clear Quick Collection. Alternatively you can use the keyboard shortcut Command + Shift + X.

You can also right click on a collected font or press and hold on the Quick Collection icon in the bottom right. Then choose the Clear Collected Fonts option from the menu. That will deselect all collected fonts that are available in the current view.

Saving the Quick Collection

To save the Quick Collection simply drag the collected fonts to the + button in the sidebar. You can create a new tag which will be attached to the collected fonts.

What happens to the Quick Collection after closing Typeface?

Typeface will restore your Quick Collection if it still contains fonts when you close the app. You can find the previous Quick Collection by choosing the saved-quick-collection tag in the sidebar. If you’d rather keep the fonts collected instead of in a separate tag, choose the Restore Quick Collection option in the Settings. The third option Clear Quick Collection will reset the collected fonts and won’t store or restore it.

Click to collect

If you prefer a more traditional way of selecting fonts you can switch to the Click to collect mode. This mode swaps the click action and the corner action of a font. When enabled, clicking on a preview will select the font. Clicking the corner will show font details.

The default mode is Click to view details, which means that you’ll go to font details when you click on a font preview in the grid. Clicking on the collect corner will collect the font.

Default click action

To switch modes click on the grid icon in the toolbar and enable/disable the Click to Collect Fonts option. Or change the Default Action setting in Settings.

Click to collect fonts setting


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