I gather Font Navigator is seen as a bit superseded by more recent commercial font managers, but I find that many of the whiz-bang features in the newer apps look impressive in screenshots but aren't all that useful to me in my workflow. So I still use Font Navigator (with thanks to Corel for still including it in the Graphics Suite!).
Corel, please, can you just make the Duplicate Fonts window resizeable? Just the fact that it isn't makes this feature enormously cumbersome to use.
Also on my wishlist for FN:
2) Make the toolbar editable, so some of the options can be added to the toolbar as single-click icons
3) Make the "Explore" options customisable, so other options can be added (for instance, showing characters in the font with diacritics)
4) Make FN not follow Windows' daft "missing glyph" autofill, where it "borrows" glyphs from other fonts to fill spaces of missing glyphs in the font you've chosen. I've never yet seen a Windows selection for this that was adequate to use, and would rather know where the gaps are in the font I'm looking at. Adobe apps can do this, so it's possible.
Hello Claude,
Thanks indeed for taking the time to read my post and respond. Very much appreciated!
I know my suggestions were very basic, but I was bearing in mind the fact that FN seems basically an added-value utility for CorelDRAW, rather than a selling point for the Suite in itself. I understand that Corel won't have a lot of resources to spend on developing the FN as a sophisticated tool. I'm very grateful to you and your team for the ongoing focus the Suite has on typographic tools, so I limited my comments to features that (I feel) could make the FN more useable at the feature level it currently has.
That said, something more I'd like to add (since a Real Live Person is listening!):
At first I wrote a long rationale for this, about a function-based schema for type classification to help a user find the right face for a project without visually sorting through typefaces every time, but I'm not sure anyone would have read it. So I deleted all that, and it comes down to: I really appreciate the Groups function in FN; I wondered if it would be possible to make FN auto-generate Groups (perhaps, on demand) according to the folders that font files are stored in? In my own case, I've sorted my fonts into sub-folders according to visual style and appearance, which helps me far more in finding the right typeface than knowing, say, a certain font is a Humanist or Gothic face.
I like how easy it is to create and populate a Group for a specific project, so that seems taken care of already. But a functional sorting of faces (for instance, what face is going to give me that Fin-de-siècle feeling?) is something that most font managers don't have an answer for. I woud dearly love to see some strides in that direction, though I recognise that most font files have no metadata that would make sorting them easy beyond rudimentary groupings. Hence, my own folder structures.
Is there a way FN can help with that?
Hello Jason; I use NexusFont myself. I like it a lot and it's also Free. But Font Nav. works well.
George