News

Restoring Activated Fonts

Fonts manually activated using Typeface should stay activated until explicitly deactivated, even after restarting your Mac. Your activated fonts will therefore stay available in your design apps.

However, Typeface does not prevent other applications from activating or deactivating fonts. External (de)activations are respected and the font activation status is updated accordingly in your library. This makes sure that the app doesn’t fight you or other apps — for example when you manually activate fonts using Font Book, or when Adobe Fonts updates the synced fonts on your Mac. These changes should not be reverted automatically, because they are deliberate actions.

But sometimes deactivations are not deliberately made by you and you may find that your activated fonts are suddenly not available anymore. This may for example happen when macOS is updated to a newer version. During the update process the system may clear the macOS font cache, which results in deactivation of your fonts.

Now Typeface can detect those deactivations at launch and allows you to easily restore the activated fonts. You can choose to reactivate them, or leave them deactivated — you stay in charge.

Backups

In addition to detecting deactivated fonts at launch you can also restore activated fonts at any time from a backup. Tag backups contain information about your activations and you can optionally restore them when importing a backup.

The new Backup section in Settings allows you to view and restore the automatic backups Typeface creates when you close the app. So whenever you notice fonts were deactivated without your consent, you’ll be up and running again quickly by restoring them from a backup.

Enjoy!

Exporting Glyphs

Fonts are mainly used to render text on your screen. You type characters in your document and the font displays its glyphs for each of those characters.

But sometimes you may want to use just a single specific character. For example to use it as an icon in your design, or perhaps as base shape for a monogram or logo.

Now you can drag and drop a character from the Characters detail tab and export it as vector. Drop it directly into your design and you’ll get an editable shape. Most major design apps should support this and Typeface automatically switches formats based on the target design application.

You can also drag a character to Finder or your Desktop. You’ll get a nice .svg file which can be edited further, or used directly as icon.

Filtering Characters

The bottom toolbar of the Characters tab now has three new features: categories, search and sorting.

Categories

The categories dropdown allows you to focus on a specific set of characters that a font supports. Characters are separated by script Latin, Greek, Cyrillic etc. and by type Numeral, Currency, Math etc.

The Additional Glyphs category contains glyphs that are not directly mapped to a Unicode character. These could be used for advanced layout (OpenType/AAT) features, such as ligatures or alternates (see the Features tab). Or they may be unmapped, which means they cannot be used in standard texts. But you can export these glyphs as vector from Typeface.

Search

Using the new search field you can find the exact character you need. You can search for a Unicode name, such as "Omega", and all variants of the Greek letter omega will be visible. The app also searches custom glyph names, if these are included in the font.

Additionally, you can enter a single specific character. For example search for "A" and all ‘A’ characters will be displayed, including accented variants.

It’s also possible to search for a character by Unicode code point. For example "U+A9" will find the copyright symbol ‘©’. You can enter the code point in decimal "169", hexadecimal "A9" or Unicode "U+00A9" formats.

Sorting

When you open the Characters tab you may notice that the font characters are displayed in a new, more useful, order. The new default is a custom Alphabetic ordering, which sorts characters by script and groups similar characters together. This allows you to get a quick overview of alphabetic letters and it’s much easier to see which diacritics are supported.

The original Unicode sorting is also available. This orders characters by their Unicode code point. While characters are generally grouped by script in Unicode Blocks, letters may be mixed with symbols and punctuation, and some similar characters may not be close together.

Finally there is a Glyph ordering. This is the order of the glyphs as they’re stored internally in the font. Typically that may not be very useful as it is often the same as Unicode ordering. But it could be handy for certain fonts that have custom symbol glyphs.

Enjoy!

List view

Switch to the brand new List view to get a tabular overview of your fonts with detailed font metadata.

The List view is not just a simple table with technical font info — fonts are grouped by family and display useful aggregate data for all fields. Such that you can quickly see which families contain fonts from multiple locations, different versions or manufacturers.

The Style Range graph in the style column presents a visual summary of family font styles. This allows you to see at a glance whether a family contains a wide range of font styles, or just a single one. The graph marks font members by weight: light on the left to bold on the right, and has separate indicators for roman/italic and multiple variants.

You can toggle between List (tabular data) and Grid (previews) using the view button in the toolbar. Alternatively choose View > as List from the main menu, or press Command1 for Grid, Command3 for List.

Columns can be adjusted by right clicking (or Control-clicking) on the table header, or by long pressing on the toolbar view button. Click on any column header to change the order of your fonts.

Learn more about the List view

Partial families

To make working with the List view more intuitive there has been an under-the-hood change of how families are grouped. Previously grouped families would always show all fonts in a family, even if not all family members would match your current tag or filters. For example if you attached a tag to single regular font, the grid still showed the full family including light and bold when browsing that tag.

Now both the Grid and List support partial families. Families will only show the family members that exactly match the filters and tags you have selected. This is particularly useful if you have duplicate fonts from separate locations. Selecting a location in the sidebar will now exclusively show fonts from that location, and family members from other locations will not be grouped together anymore.

Enjoy!

Typeface 4.0 requires macOS 12 Monterey or later. This update is free for everyone. New Pro features, such as List view, may require an extension of your license.