Cfont Pro

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on December 05, 2012

Windows accepts nearly every kind of font, but managing them is a different story. Freeware font managers can fill the need, and there are plenty to choose from. Veign's Cfont Pro is a powerful tool for viewing and managing your system's fonts. It can install and uninstall font packages, print and export font data, and even repair common registry errors that can affect fonts. Its Preview mode lets you see fonts before actually installing them, and a SlideShow mode displlays installed fonts one by one. Cfont Pro's extras include a glyph viewer and a Zoomer tool that shows a highly magnified view of any part of your screen in a small, gridded window. It can display individual characters in pixel-by-pixel detail.

Cfont Pro opens with a tool tip you can turn on or off in the Options menu. The program's user interface is a busy but well-designed take on the classic Explorer-style layout, with customizable navigation tools like the Font Browser in the left sidebar, a Font Properties display in the right sidebar, and an information panel below. All the panels can be customized, resized, closed, and pinned open. A browser-style toolbar offers basic font controls like italics and size in pixels. The main window displays a sample of each font you select.

The fully indexed Help file reviews each feature, starting with the Archive Cleaner, which can remove unused fonts from your system, reclaiming disk space. Users who boot from a smaller solid-state drive (SSD) will welcome this feature, but even if your C drive is large enough not to worry about space constraints, removing unused fonts helps keep Windows slim, too, which can mean faster boots and better performance.

You may not realize just how many fonts your system has until you view them in a good font manager, and Cfont Pro is a very good font manager, not only for installing fonts and repairing font-related issues but also for removing unneeded fonts and previewing fonts before writing them into Windows. Cfont Pro belongs at the top of any list of free font managers.