FontDesk

1. Overview

FontDesk is a font manager for Windows built around one question no other font manager on Windows answers: which of your fonts can actually set the language you work in?

Most font managers show you a list of fonts and let you install them. FontDesk assumes you have hundreds of Urdu, Persian, Pashto or Sindhi fonts of wildly varying quality, and that the useful question is not “what have I got” but “which of these will do the job”.

So it does three things, in order:

1. Read — point it at a folder and it reads every font in it without installing anything.
2. Judge — it tells you what each font covers, whether it joins correctly, and where it fails.
3. Install — once you have decided, install one or a batch, for yourself or for everyone.

2. Getting Started

Install FontDesk from the Microsoft Store.

• Windows 10 / 11 (64-bit)

Add a library

Press Add Library and choose a folder. FontDesk reads everything in it and its subfolders, and the folder appears under LIBRARIES in the sidebar. You can also drop a folder onto the window.

Nothing is installed. Nothing is copied. The fonts stay where they are, and FontDesk keeps only what it learned about them.

One window

FontDesk runs once per Windows session. Launching it again brings the open window to the front rather than starting a second copy.

3. Libraries & the Sidebar

The sidebar is destinations, not filters. Each is a different place with different actions:

Below them, FILTERS narrow whichever destination you are in.

FontDesk reads TrueType, OpenType, TrueType/OpenType collections, WOFF and WOFF2. A face inside a collection is treated as a font in its own right — Cambria and Cambria Math share one file and appear, preview and analyse as two fonts, each of which can be tagged and installed separately.

4. The Dashboard

The dashboard counts your families and faces, how many are installed and how many are not, how many libraries you have added and how much they take on disk, and breaks the collection down by format and foundry.

Languages your fonts can set

This is the panel worth reading. It counts, for each language, how many of your faces have every letter it needs, join them correctly, and place marks where they belong.

An Urdu collection typically reads something like Arabic 403, Persian 387, Urdu 347, Pashto 84, Sindhi 66 — because covering the Arabic block is common and covering Sindhi is not.

Worth a look

Lists what needs attention: name conflicts, pre-Unicode faces, restricted licences, and files that could not be read at all.

5. Judging a Font

Select a font and the right-hand pane shows:

• A size ladder in that font.
• A specimen per script it covers. Latin, Arabic and Urdu get phrases. Every other language shows the letters it adds to Arabic — Persian’s row is پ چ ژ گ, Sindhi’s is ٺ ٻ ٿ ڀ ڄ — because those are the letters that distinguish it and the ones a half-hearted font gets wrong.
• Arabic shaping — whether it joins, and which features it carries. Every letter is shaped isolated, initial, medial and final, so a face that has the letters but cannot connect them is not mistaken for one that works.
• Mark positioning — unattached and colliding marks, counted against real pairs.
• Glyphs and Compare tabs beside Overview. The glyph map gives coverage by Unicode block, or one block’s glyphs with their ids, advances, sidebearings and the OpenType features that touch them.
• An OpenType feature playground — untick a feature to see what it was doing.

Pre-Unicode fonts

FontDesk recognises pre-Unicode InPage-era fonts — the ones whose codepoints carry no Unicode meaning — and says so, rather than showing you rows of empty boxes and leaving you to guess whether the font or the text is at fault.

6. Previews

Each font is shown a sample it can actually render, chosen from its own coverage. An Urdu face gets Urdu; a Latin face gets Latin. Nothing shows a row of empty boxes because it was handed the wrong script.

Type in the preview text box to set your own string for every font. A font that cannot set your string falls back to its own sample and says cannot set your text beside it — so you keep a useful screen and learn which fonts fail your string.

7. Comparing Two Fonts

Ctrl+click two fonts and the Compare tab lights up:

• An onion-skin overlay normalised by cap height rather than by nominal point size — so two faces with different units-per-em are genuinely comparable.
• Their metrics side by side, as em fractions.
• Which codepoints one has and the other lacks.
• Their OpenType feature differences.

FontDesk will also find similar fonts in your own library, and suggest headline / body pairings from what you already have.

8. Sets, Tags & Finding Things

Sets

Tick fonts anywhere, press Add to set, and name it. One field asks which set — type a new name to make one. Every face of every ticked family goes in, so the italic is there when you need it.

A set can be activated or deactivated as a whole, which is the point of it: one gesture puts a document’s faces on the desktop and another takes them away.

Deleting a set deletes a list, never a font.

Smart lists

Standing questions that keep themselves current — variable fonts, pre-Unicode faces, name conflicts, restricted licences, bold or heavier, italic, can set Urdu, and so on.

Tags, ratings, colours and notes

In the detail pane. They are keyed to the font’s own content, so they survive it being moved, renamed, or reinstalled from somewhere else.

Finding things

• The search box matches metadata — family, full name, PostScript name, foundry — not filenames.
• Contains this text in the sidebar takes a pasted string and shows only fonts that can render every character of it.
• Ctrl+K opens the command palette: every command and every destination by name, matched by subsequence, so adlib finds Add library and three letters of a library’s name find the library.

9. Installing

FontDesk offers only the actions that mean something for the font in front of you.

Install for me

Copies the font into your own font folder and registers it for your Windows account. No administrator prompt.

Word, InPage and most applications see it immediately. Adobe applications have historically ignored per-user fonts — if you use them, install for everyone instead.

Web fonts (.woff, .woff2) can be previewed and analysed but not installed: Windows cannot load them. Install the font’s TTF or OTF instead.

Install for everyone

Copies it into the system font folder for every account on the machine, and makes it usable straight away rather than after you next sign in. Windows asks for administrator approval. Declining aborts; nothing half-happens.

The Install for all users tick in the status bar sets this for the next batch, and stays on until you turn it off. Windows asks once for each font in the batch; declining any one of them stops the rest.

Conflicts

FontDesk detects duplicate family claims and version mismatches, and flags them on the dashboard under Worth a look.

10. Activation — Using a Font Without Installing It

Activate for this session makes a font available to every application on the desktop until you close FontDesk. Nothing is copied, nothing is written to the registry, and there is nothing to uninstall afterwards.

This is the answer to “I need this face for one document.”

Everything activated is released when FontDesk closes. If it does not close cleanly — a crash, or the process being ended — whatever it had activated is released the next time it starts.

Activating a family or a set loads every face in it, so the italic and bold are there too.

11. Undo & Safe Uninstall

Undo

History lists everything FontDesk has installed or removed, newest first, one line per thing you did. A batch of two hundred is one line and undoes in one click.

Undoing an install removes the copy FontDesk installed and never touches the file you installed from. A font that was already installed when you asked is not recorded, so undoing a batch removes only what that batch added.

Uninstalling keeps a copy of the font first, so undo really does put it back — for the same users it was installed for, under its own file name. If a copy could not be kept, the status line says so at the time, before you go looking for an undo that is not there.

Safe uninstall

FontDesk refuses to remove the faces Windows draws its own interface with — Segoe UI, Arial, Tahoma and the rest — and tells you which and why rather than simply greying out a button.

12. Specimens & Printing

Specimen PDF writes a printable type specimen: the family, a size ladder set in the font itself, and what FontDesk knows about it. Real vector text, so it prints at any size. Print sends the same sheet to a printer.

Paper is A4 or US Letter, in Settings.

13. Backup & Restore

Settings ▸ Storage, or the command palette: Back up library. Writes a zip holding your libraries, sets, tags, ratings and notes.

The font index is deliberately not in it — that is rebuilt by a scan, and including it would multiply the size of the backup to preserve nothing.

14. Settings

Reached from the gear in the toolbar.

15. Keyboard Shortcuts

16. Where Your Things Are Kept

All of it on your own machine, in %LOCALAPPDATA%\FontDesk:

If a font disappears from disk while FontDesk is open — deleted, or on a drive you unplugged — selecting it says so in the status bar. F5 rescans and removes it from the list.

FontDesk makes no network connections of any kind.

17. Known Limitations

Honest notes on the current release, so nothing comes as a surprise:

• Type 1 (.pfb, .pfm) and legacy .FON bitmap fonts are listed but not read. They are reported as unsupported rather than damaged, because that is what they are.
• Auto-activation per project — activating a document’s fonts when you open it — is deferred. The mechanism exists; Windows offers no reliable signal that a document was opened.
• Activated Fonts does not survive a restart, by design. Activation is a loan, not an install.
• The dashboard’s language counts mean has every letter. Whether a font joins them is a separate, slower analysis that runs for the font you have selected.
• Install and uninstall act on the style a row shows — usually the regular — not on every style in the family. Activation does take every style.
• Installing a batch for everyone asks for approval once per font.
• Previews are drawn at standard resolution, so with Windows display scaling at 125% or more they look slightly soft. Judge fine detail at 100%.
• The glyph map draws a whole block at once; a very large block, such as CJK Unified Ideographs, takes a moment.