FontShop Adds Illustrator Support to its Font Preview Plugin

They've been a long time coming but plugins for Creative Suite applications that make it possible to browse and preview fonts from vendors directly within layouts are finally becoming available. The FontShop plugin, which seems to be stuck in a perpetual beta mode, was first released for Photoshop. Support has now been extended to Mac and Windows Illustrator CS3-CS6.

Once installed, users can search within FontShop's collection of 150,000 fonts on such criteria as font, designer or foundry name, or choose from one of the classic categories. Handy is the ability to see related fonts or use an experimental Find Similar button for finding visually related fonts. You can then preview a font, with it displaying in selected parts of your design and the corresponding text layers rendered invisible. The preview will try to match the original text fields in terms of color, approximate size and position. Fonts can be tagged as favorites, with a Download button leading to purchase on FontShop.com. It's worth noting that Fonts.com also provides a plugin, although FontGazer, shown below, only works with InDesign.