Checking through different fonts quickly

Question

There's a trick I've seen other graphic designers do wehre they'll highlight a block of text, and then seemingly down-arrow through their whole list of fonts, seeing how it looks on that text block, 'til they find one that looks right. Yet when I try to emulate, it doesn't work for me: I have to manually click the Font box, pick one, see how it looks, and repeat. It goes from being an effortless tap-tap-tap on the keyboard to a click-drag-click-drag chore. What's the trick?

Answer 1

The Macintosh version of Illustrator won't do this. It's been requested for literally years that they fix it, but it's still not fixed. It works fine in Windows Illustrator and Win/Mac Photoshop. But you just can't do it on a Mac with Illustrator.

Keep your fingers crossed that they might actually fix it with the next release.

Answer 2

What program are you using? Because in Photoshop (maybe other Adobe programs as well, I'm not too sure), you highlight your text, click inside the font chooser box and then whilst your text is still highlight (don't click anything at this point) put your mouse anywhere you want on the page and use the scroll bar and it will roll through all the fonts, whilst changing it on the text you've highlighted. Or, instead of scrolling, just tap the up and down keys.

I know it doesn't do this with word, as far as I know, though.

Answer 3

I hadn't realized this bug existed on the Mac version of Illustrator before (I'm a Windows user, but I also never use this feature since I generally have about 100+ fonts active at any given time, so it's just a bit impractical), but I would recommend these workarounds:

• Using the Type->Font menu as your preview. The preview shows the font name instead of your text, and it's rendered in the GUI colors, but it's better than nothing. And I believe it's possible to change the font size used for this preview.
• Using a font manager to preview fonts (including inactive ones). Most font managers will allow you to change the preview text, and many will allow you to change the foreground and background color, as well as insert a custom background image. It's a bit of work to do this for every type element you wanna edit, but it's probably worth it for certain cases.
• Use the DiskFonts plugin (works in CS3 to CS5 for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign; in CS5 it also works for Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Premiere). This is commercial software, which costs $29, but it lets you preview your text in any font on your computer, whether it's active or not, and is also dockable on your Android or iOS device while you're working. It looks like it lets you choose the FG & BG colors, but doesn't support BG images.