Why FontCurator
Other font managers stop at “here’s a list of your fonts”. The work doesn’t. FontCurator carries it the rest of the way — through every kind of font task a working studio, type designer, or marketing team actually does in a year. Not one problem solved. Nine.
Nine answers
The font itself
01 · Inspect
Toggle ligatures, alternates, small caps, all twenty stylistic sets in real time. What you see is what your design app will render — full kerning, full OpenType behaviour, no shortcut text-shaping pretending to be the real thing. The part every other font manager skips.
02 · Catalogue
Categories and tags together, so the same typeface appears in every cut of the library you’d ever want to make. Six-tab inspector per font. PUA & full glyph table. An identity that survives the file moving, renaming, or reimporting from backup.
03 · Cover
CLDR analysis for 1,000+ written languages, character by character. The Czech-ogonek, Polish-comma-below, and Vietnamese-tone-mark surprises stop on the page, not on press. Partial-coverage gaps surface as a specific list of missing glyphs, before legal calls.
The studio’s work
04 · Build
Every brand, campaign, or publication becomes a project with its own font roster, locale list, team, pairings, status, and a live readiness scorecard. Eight tabs per project. The feature other font managers don’t take seriously.
05 · Recall
A pairing you saved for Acme in March is one click away when Beta arrives in October. Hard-won typography decisions stop being rediscovered with every brief and start being recalled. Add a font to a new project — its proven pairings offer themselves for import.
06 · Iterate
Configure your font compiler — Glyphs, FontLab, RoboFont, FontForge — to write build artefacts into a scan path. Every recompile lands live in FontCurator and every running design app, via a proper unregister-and-reregister CoreText dance. No manual reimport.
The paperwork
07 · Licence
Per-font records tell you what you own. Per-project clearances tell you what each engagement requires — webfont versus digital ads versus printed packaging, each its own licence type. One campaign, three licences, all tracked. Licensing is where every other font manager stops.
08 · Prove
“Are we good to launch?” — or “show me the licensing on this campaign” — gets a signed, dated, beautifully set document. Not a database export. Not a screen recording. Something professionals trade. Per-font specimens and full project galleries export the same way.
09 · Trace
Per-project, per-font, and global event log — automatic, in the same transaction that creates each record. When did the foundry confirmation get filed? Who signed off the German clearance? When was the project marked ready? The log answers without a second’s digging.
Type is a craft, but the business of using type is increasingly a paperwork problem. FontCurator puts the paperwork in its place — so the craft has room to breathe.
— FontCurator was designed and built by a working typographer who lives the problem.
Yours, not ours
No subscription
Buy a version, own it. Today’s runs for as long as your Mac supports it. You stop paying nobody — because nobody’s billing you.
No lock-in
Your fonts stay where macOS keeps them — in Font Book, in User Fonts, visible to every app. Your tags, notes, licences, and projects export in seconds, in formats anyone can read.
No forced upgrades
Tomorrow’s upgrade is yours to choose, or not. The vendor doesn’t switch off the version you depend on. The roadmap doesn’t take your catalogue hostage.
Receipts
1,000+
languages analysed per font
20
feature areas, one app
0
subscriptions, ever