If you own a lot of fonts, you might wish you had the services of a type librarian — someone who would catalog your collection so you could more easily find the fonts you need for a particular job. theTypeBook is the next best thing. It offers several layouts so you can print a catalog of your PostScript and TrueType typefaces.
The program includes six layouts, which you can print or view on screen. The Sample Page layout was best for my most frequent publishing task — choosing a text face for a newsletter, brochure, or the like. Each Sample Page displays a partial character set for a single font (upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and a few symbols) in 9 sizes ranging from 6 point to 48 point. It also displays text samples with different combinations of point size and leading and gives copyfitting information such as capital-letter height and characters per pica for different sizes.
theFontBook lets you print a keycaps table showing the characters produced by each keystroke or keystroke combination (especially handy for pictorial fonts); a complete character set (1 font per page); a partial character set (up to 15 fonts per page); a character-set/text-block combination (6 fonts per page); or an index, with one line of sample text per font.
Show Me Your Face
You can select all your faces at once, include or exclude bitmap fonts, or select just the faces you wish to print. Then, pick the layout you want, customize layout features such as page margins and footer text if you wish, and sit hack while theTypeBook prints your typeface reference book.
Unlike a competing product, Agfa’s TypeChart ($99), theTypeBook lets you customize point size and leading for the text blocks in the Sample Page layout, which is very helpful for showing the overall “color,” or density, of a face at different ratios of point size to leading. The program also allows you to customize your catalog, adding a logo to the header, for example, or the font foundry’s name to the page header. Another handy option lets you assign a face an alternate name — changing AJenson (for Adobe Jenson) to Jenson, say — so the specimen pages appear under J rather than A when you print your catalog.
But theTypeBook has a few disadvantages as well. My main beef is that you have to print out your own manual, which is included as a file on the program’s disk. This endeavor costs you approximately 15 minutes of your time and 40 sheets of paper — time and paper that could be better used for printing type samples. When I spend $60 for a program, I expect a printed manual. (Tiny type and scaled-down figures make reading the manual on screen an unpleasant experience.) Parts of the documentation could stand to be clearer and more concise, and an index would be nice. The company assures me that a new and improved manual well be included with version 4.0.1, which is scheduled to he released shortly.
One more complaint: though you can customize the Sample Page’s footer — displaying your company name and logo, for example — you must first enter a password. The manual states that this “prevents unauthorized modifications by supporting members of your staff,” but I am my staff, so I would rather that this feature were optional.
The Last Word
For push-button simplicity in a type-specimen generator, TypeChart is a better choice. But if you don’t mind navigating theTypeBook’s lengthy manual (not to mention printing it out), you’ll be rewarded with customization options that should allow you to create a type-specimen book that meets your needs.
Fenton, Erfert. (June 1995). theTypeBook 4.0. Macworld. (pg. 73).
Rascal Software
Applications
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2014-04-14 / 
fac68d520f21793b24aa91cc632e98b693c66f70 / 
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typebook402b-image.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
