How to create a truetype font index for Xara

I absolutely love Xara and have done for the past 8 years or more. It is simply one of the fastest and easiest graphics packages available - And cheap too!!!

I use Xara for producing advertising materials, website designs and animations. It is the sheer speed and ease of use that makes it one of the MUST HAVE software products in my arsenal.

Over the years I have amassed a large library of truetype fonts (about 1800) which until now I have had to install to get them to work properly with Xara. The problem is that, to use the 'Add disc fonts' option of Xara, you must have a pre-compiled XaraInfo folder which contains the preview bitmaps of the fonts. Xara does not come with an application to create these font indexes so a bit of Googling was required.

Enter 'The font box' - I found a forum post where people were having a similair problem and on the last page of the post I found an application for download which did exactly what I needed

OK, the program is a little rough around the edges but does exactly what it says on the tin.

Dead easy to use:-

• Open my consolidated fonts folder
• Click create new project icon
• Select all fonts from main list
• Drag them to the lower pane
• Review each font to see if they should be Upper, lower or mixed case previews
• Click save and a new folder was created on my PC with the Xara library.
• Open disc fonts in Xara and Voila!!

I must express a big thank you to AntiMix for writing a tool which SHOULD be installed as part of Xara. Download it here

Thanks again Antimix