Mac Kung Fu, 2nd Edition

Tip 354

Create Font Families

Although most of us don’t get beyond bold and italics, many of OS X’s fonts include other style variations, such as Light or Condensed.

The OS X font manager app, Font Book, lets you create font collections in which you can place such fonts to organize them for ease of access. Collections are like folders that hold files within Finder, although fonts aren’t actually copied or moved into collections. They’re merely a way of categorizing them, and one font could be in several different collections.

Crucially, however, font collections are displayed in the Fonts palette that appears whenever you hit Command+T in apps like TextEdit of Pages. Microsoft Word offers a Font Collections submenu at the top of its font listing ...