Font Organiser

I have a lot of TrueType/OpenType fonts kicking around on my PC. Some came with various versions of Windows, some came with other software, some were free downloads, a few were actually purchased. Many of them have really short and unhelpful file names. It would be nice to have them all in one place, be able to search them by name, and distinguish between reputable foundries and anonymous knockoffs. Hence, this Python script.

Getting It and Using It

Be aware that this is a work-in-progress, tailored to my own requirements, written with zero concern for user-friendliness, and liberally sprinkled with # TODO: comments.

The script fontorg.py can be found on GitHub.

Edit the script, and change these lines to point to the directories of your choice:

source      = r'D:/Fonts/To Sort/'
destination = r'D:/Fonts/Sorted/'

The script will process all .ttf and .otf files in the source directory, and copy them to the destination directory with more helpful filenames. Filenames will consist of the font name and style, followed by a bracketed version number or date where available. Where possible, fonts are placed in subdirectories named after their author or manufacturer. Failing that, known font creators will be identified by their copyright or trademark messages; these are defined in the list creators, which currently takes up half the script.

Everything else will be filed under (unknown). For these fonts, the copyright and trademark messages are written to the file unknowns.txt, which I occasionally trawl for repeat offenders who can be added to the creators list.

If you want the fonts deleted from the source directory, uncomment this line:

#   os.remove(file)

Oh, and be prepared to learn that many of the 1001 FREE FONTS!!!!11.zip that you downloaded are actually pirated commercial fonts 🙄 . My collection is a lot smaller now.