FontSiphon

FontSiphon is a font manager. It reads every typeface already installed on your computer, shows you a big live specimen of each one in its own design, and lets you switch families on and off without touching a command line or dragging files between folders.

Everything happens on your computer. Your font library is never uploaded, there is no account to create, and the app works offline apart from the Google Fonts library, which is the only thing it goes online for.

Highlights

1. See every font at a glance - your whole library rendered in its own typeface, with your own preview text, a size slider from 10 to 120 pixels, and list, grid or waterfall layouts.
2. Turn fonts on and off with one click - deactivate the families you are not using and they leave your font menus everywhere, instantly. Nothing is deleted, and one click brings them back exactly where they were.
3. Preview what is switched off - a deactivated font still shows a real specimen, because FontSiphon reads the file directly instead of asking the system. You never have to reinstall something just to see what it looks like.
4. Collections for real projects - group the fonts a brand or a client needs, then switch the entire set on when you start work and off when you finish.
5. Real metadata, read from the file - family and style names, weight, width, glyph count, units per em, variable-font axes, designer, foundry, version and licence, all parsed straight out of the font's own name table.
6. A character map you can use - every glyph the font actually contains, drawn in that font, and a click copies the character to your clipboard.
7. The whole Google Fonts library, built in - browse and search nearly two thousand families, preview them in your own text before committing, and install every weight with one button.
8. Search and filter that keep up - find a font by family, style, designer or foundry, and narrow the view by classification: sans, serif, slab, script, display, monospace or symbol.
9. Favourites and tidy sorting - star the faces you reach for constantly and sort by name, style count, file size or classification.
10. Open a font file by double-clicking it - any .ttf, .otf or .ttc file opens in FontSiphon as a proper specimen first, and it offers to install it only once you have seen it.
11. Honest about what it cannot touch - fonts the system protects are marked as locked with a plain explanation, instead of a toggle that fails after you click it.

How it works

Open FontSiphon and it reads your font folders straight away - your own fonts, the ones shared by every account on the machine, and the ones that came with the system. Pick a sample from the list - a pangram, the alphabet, the numerals - or choose Custom and type your own words, and every specimen changes to match, so you can compare candidates on your actual headline instead of on somebody else's sample sentence.

Deactivating a family moves its file into FontSiphon's own store, out of the folder the system reads to decide which fonts are available. That is why the change shows up immediately in every app, survives a restart, and can always be undone: the file is still there, just parked. Turning it back on puts it back where it came from.

Perfect for

1. Designers with a font menu so long it takes a scroll to reach the T's
2. Anyone choosing a typeface and wanting to see it set in their own words first
3. People juggling several brands, each with its own small set of fonts
4. Developers and writers who want a good monospace face and a quick way to compare the options
5. Anyone who has installed a Google font by hand once and would rather never do it again