The very first thing to do once you have Fontmatrix up and running is to import fonts that you want to manage with Fontmatrix.
Use Import... option from File menu. Navigate until you find a directory containing your fonts, it will do a one time recursion through the directories. Once Fontmatrix has scanned the directories, they are imported into the left hand panel, however, the fonts are not activated by default. You can also import them via Drag and Drop.
Fontmatrix's window is divided in two major parts. On the left side there are Font listing and Preview tabs, while right hand side displays various info about each font, logically separated into Info, Sample Text, Glyphs and Tags tabs.
Navigating through the list is simplified by multiple levels of depth:
Fonts are sorted by the first letter of font typeface, full typeface name and the deepest level - the variant. On the last two levels fonts can be activated. Enabling typefaces is done by clicking on the checkbox in front of the name. You can selectively enable just singluar variants at the lowest level.
The chosen font is automatically synchronized with the preview tab, framing the preview in the opposite direction. You can use Ctrl+Space to switch between the tabs on the
There are additional helpers below: 'View all' and 'View activated' which are pretty self explainary.
When you finally get familiar with your collection of fonts you can use search mechanism to narrow a selection of fonts. Searching is optionally case sensitive.
The main reason this program is called a font manager is its most powerful features are tagging fonts and organizing tags into collections for specific use. More info on that is to come later.
Fontmatrix is able to give verbose informations about imported font. There are basicly three kind of informations this font manager can provide:
Understanding tags and tagsets concept is crucial at this point.
Tags are basicly user defined attributes that can be assigned to a font, while TagSets are a collections of those attributes.
Tag can be anything you want. Good example would be 'book' for typefaces suitable for book text layout and 'header' for chapter nemes of the same book.
Following the same example, ideal TagSet would be 'Name of the book' which would be nothing more the union of typefaces/fonts 'book' and 'header' tags include. Bear in mind that any of tags can belong to more then one TagSet at a time.
Select a font from font list on the left and switch to Tags tab on the left. Now you're able to write a Tag's name and add it pressing 'Add tag' button. Although tag appeared in tag list it's not assigned to any font by default. This must be done manually by clicking in check box in front of a tag. To add flexibility, Fontmatrix can assign multiple tags to one font.
Bring TagSet editor to the front. You can access it through menu Edit and selecting Tag Sets item.
FINISH LATER!