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Many of us use fonts in our designing and have collected a library of fonts that we have purchased or downloaded from freeware hosts. It can be annoying trying to pick an appropriate font for your work from the little drop-down menu used in most programs so I set out to find a way to make a sample sheet of fonts, listed in their font form so I can easily scan them all, compare designs and even print it out to help me pick the most appropriate.

I came across this simple tutorial from Quantum Software and it worked like a charm. Using a simple Word Macro, you can create a handy sheet containing samples of all fonts installed on the system. To create the macro:

• Click on Tools, Macro, Macros.
• Type a name for the macro (e.g. ListFonts)
• Click Create.
• Erase anything that may be on the visual basic window that opens and replace it with the following:

Sub ListFonts
‘Automatically prints out a sample sheet of all the fonts
Dim Fontlist As Variant
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Documents.Add Template:=”normal”
For Each Fontlist in FontNames
With Selection
.Font.Name = Fontlist
.Font.Size = 12
.TypeText Fontlist
.InsertParagraphAfter
.MoveDown Unit:=wdParagraph, Count:=1, Extend:=wdMove
End With
Next Fontlist
Selection.WholeStory
Selection.Sort
Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
End Sub

• Close Visual Basic Editor by clicking ‘X’ and save the changes.
• Run the macro to create a list of all the fonts on your computer. The name of each font will be listed in the particular font.

Handy, eh?