In any given month three or four designers ask us for a good way to print type specimen books. While several tools offer this ability, here are our current favorites:

Vennix’s Font Tools 6.0 (screenshot shown here) prints meaningful font specimen pages, not only from active fonts, but from inactive
fonts as well. It sports an attractive interface including a special type book creator which allows you to easily select and print font samples in a variety of layouts. Font Tools can also scan Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign documents for used fonts, and collect the results to help aid archiving. [Cost: $50]

Lemke’s FontBook 4.4 has a much wider selection of layouts available for printing books. However it offers few options to select which fonts you wish to print, which can waste a lot of time (or paper) when printing larger type collections. The software itself feels less polished than Font Tools, however the choice of layouts and lower price may appeal to some designers. [Shareware: $10]

About once a month, a client will ask how to hang punctuation in Adobe InDesign CS. We’ve answered this same question dozens of times — yet I still find myself hunting around through menus to remember which dialog box contains the needed checkbox!

This tip covers hanging punctuation techniques in Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Freehand MX, and QuarkXPress.