How to quickly find an installed font for use in graphics programs and documents?

Question

I don't use Photoshop or Word all that much but, when I do, I end up sifting through the zillion fonts on my system (installed via various programs) to find the right font for the text I want to put into an image or document. As I sift through the list and I find the fonts I like for the current context, I write down the font name in Notepad or on a piece of paper. Then I go back over the fonts I liked and evaluate the best of the lot. This process takes about 30 minutes to an hour every time I do it, so finding fonts for just a few lines of text can take several hours to complete. I feel like this isn't a particularly good use of my time.

What would be ideal would be a program that I could start up, make fullscreen, type in the text I plan on using and desired font size into a couple of fields at the top. Below those fields is a split window with resizable panes on the left and right sides of the application. Then all the installed fonts appear in left pane and the entered text is used with each font and resizes to fill the space as accurately to the specified perceived font size as possible (30px should always be 30px to the user, not 15px or 75px). As I find the fonts I like, I would double-click or drag-and-drop them into the right pane. Once all the fonts have been processed in this manner, then I would have a reduced set of font names to look at in the target application. Both panes could support "copy to clipboard" and then I could paste it into the target application, saving three steps of locating the font in the application's font list, punching in the text again, and setting the font size. A fullscreen application like this would save me a ton of time (e.g. it would have saved me about three hours last night) by rejecting fonts at a glance instead of having to step through each font one-by-one in Photoshop or Word and have the relative size of the text bounce all over the place as the font changes and making constant adjustments to the font size.

Is there a program that does all of that on Windows?

More simply, is there a better process I can use in the future that I'm not aware of that will help me find the right font more quickly?

Answer 1

You should take a look at font managers like Suitcase. As long as you know the name of the font, you can use the search engine within Suitcase to find it and activate. They also now have an auto-activation plugin for Photoshop.

Suitcase

Suitcase plugin

In most programs you have a find font option that helps you list each font used in the document but not always and this changes from program to program.

Answer 2

FontNavigator, bundled with CorelDraw is your best bet, by a country mile. Daylight to second place. It's in an entirely different league to all other font navigators in terms of speed of use.