Using Tags and Comments
What Are Tags?
FontAgent® includes an all-new tag manager that you can use to describe and organize your fonts. Tags are simple keywords that you assign to fonts and sets to associate them with topics, projects, clients or anything else you want.
Tags are a great way to describe your fonts and go way beyond the metrics and metadata contained in font files. The keyword search terms used on font vendor sites are good examples of qualitative terms used by everyday users to describe their fonts.
FontAgent allows you to create tags, associate them with fonts and sets, search them, use them in Smart Sets, and even share them with other users. Tagging opens the door to a world of new ways to organize your font collection.
The most powerful use of tags is to describe fonts using a variety of subjective terms such as:
- Styles such as handwritten, woodblock, shadow, outline or symbol
- Topics such as athletics, aerospace, religion, food or nature
- Feelings such as humorous, scary or silly
- Projects such as poster, menu or party
- Holidays such as New Year, Halloween or Christmas
- Client names, project names or job numbers
Tip: Avoid using tags to describe font characteristics that are already identified in their metrics, such as italic or bold. You are better served by creating Smart Sets based on slant or weight values for those font characteristics.
Searchable Tags
The new tag manager in FontAgent 9 lets you assign keywords to your fonts to associate them. Tags are an excellent way to:
- Use tags to describe qualitative properties of fonts
- Describe qualitative and topical font properties not included in their metrics or other metadata
- Relate fonts to each other on a casual or temporary basis
- Associate fonts with projects, processes, workflow and jobs
- Describe fonts by topic, use or category
After tagging your fonts, you can use FontAgent’s Quick Search and Smart Sets to find fonts that match the tags.
Subjective Tags: Beyond Font Metadata
In addition to glyph outlines, font files contain metrics like weight and slant, as well as metadata that details descriptive information like foundry and designer. But fonts don’t contain subjective information such as:
- Visual characteristics
- Font classifications
- Typical uses of the font
- Projects in which the font is used
- Licensing details
FontAgent allows you to create descriptive tags, associate them with fonts and sets, search them, use them in Smart Sets, and even share them with other users. The deep tagging functionality in FontAgent opens the door to a world of new ways to organize your font collection.
The most powerful use of tags is to describe fonts using a variety of subjective terms such as:
- Styles such as handwritten, woodblock, shadow, outline or symbol
- Topics such as athletics, aerospace, religion, food or nature
- Feelings such as humorous, scary or silly
- Projects such as poster, menu or party
- Holidays such as New Year, Halloween or Christmas
- Client names, project names or job numbers
Tip: Avoid using tags to describe font characteristics that are already identified in their metrics, such as italic or bold. You are better served by creating Smart Sets based on slant or weight values for those font characteristics.
Tags and Sets: Important Differences
In some ways, tags work like sets in that they allow you to organize your fonts and create relationships among them. But there are important differences.
Sets provide a high-level structure of visual containers for your fonts that appear in FontAgent’s left sidebar. If you use sets extensively to organize your fonts, you know how busy that sidebar can become. FontAgent gives you two ways to solve that problem: nested subsets and tagging. Let’s stay focused on tags. In contrast to sets, tags provide a more flexible, less structured way of associating fonts while saving that precious real estate in the Sets Sidebar.
Here are some important differences between sets and tags:
- When you associate fonts in sets, you can click the set name in the Sets Sidebar and see all the fonts in the set. To do the same thing with a tag, you search on it or create a Smart Set using the tag name as its criteria.
- When you associate a tag with a set, the tag becomes part of the font’s metadata and appears in the Tags and Comments View in FontAgent’s main window.
- You can search for fonts by tag name, so finding all the fonts for a project can be easy if you add project tags to your fonts .
- When you share fonts with others, FontAgent automatically shares its tags as well, so you can use tags to create font associations across your workgroup.
- You can use tags to group fonts in the FontAgent’s Table View.
How Tags Work
As you create keyword tags, FontAgent adds them to your database. It also tracks which tags you have assigned to which fonts and sets. FontAgent allows you to:
- Create new tags
- Delete tags from your database
- Assign tags to fonts and sets
- Remove assigned tags from fonts and sets
- Rename tags globally across all your fonts
- Share tags with others in your workgroup (FontAgent Sync or Server required)
The Tags and Comments View
The Tags and Comments View in FontAgent displays custom tag and comment font metadata including tags that are synced from other machines or users in your organization. To display the view, select Tags and Comments in the bottom pane of FontAgent's main window. Then select fonts or sets to see tags associated with your selection.
Tags and Sets: Important Differences
In some ways, tags work like sets in that they allow you to organize your fonts and create relationships among them. But there are important differences.
Sets provide a high-level structure of visual containers for your fonts that appear in FontAgent’s left sidebar. If you use sets extensively to organize your fonts, you know how busy that sidebar can become. FontAgent gives you a number of ways to organize your font catalog to solve that problem. Let’s focus on tags for now. In contrast to sets, tags provide a more flexible way of associating fonts while saving that precious real estate in the Sets Sidebar.
Here are some important differences between sets and tags:
- When you associate fonts in sets, you can click the set name in the Sets Sidebar and see all the fonts in the set. To do the same thing with a tag, you search on it or create a Smart Set using the tag name as its criteria.
- When you associate a tag with a font, the tag becomes part of the font’s metadata and appears in the Tags and Comments view in FontAgent’s main window.
- You can search for fonts by tag name, so finding all the fonts for a project can be easy if you add project tags to your fonts.
- When you share fonts with others, FontAgent automatically shares its tags as well, so you can use tags to create font associations across your workgroup.
- You can use tags to group fonts in the FontAgent’s Table View.