I‘m kind of a font-whore, and as such, it takes me about a year to go through all of them one by one. There seem to be a lot of crappy font managing programs out there, but here’s one that seems a little better: Opcion Font Viewer, written by Paul Chiu. Opcion’s best quality is its ability to display a bunch of fonts at once. It uses a page forward/page back system, so you can see a whole new group of fonts (with your chosen text) with the click of a button. Opcion lets you choose how many fonts to put into a page, so if you have a big enough monitor, you can probably fit 15 or 20 at a time.
Opcion also lets you preview fonts that are not yet installed and lets you save a list of favorite fonts for quick recall. The only thing missing is a way to to see extended character sets, but that’s not really the point of this program anyway.
One final thing that gets a little annoying: Opcion was written in 2004, so it can’t be blamed, but every time I open it up in Vista, I get a warning message telling me that an “unauthorized program is trying to access my computer.” Honestly, this is more of a kavetch about Vista, but you’ve been warned.
