X-Fonter 14.0

Font Tagging

Tags are custom keywords you attach to fonts to describe their characteristics in your own terms. Unlike Collections, which group fonts into named sets, tags describe properties that individual fonts have — and you can filter by multiple tags at once to find fonts matching several criteria simultaneously.

Tags are visible in all three font tabs (Installed, Browse, Collections) as a dedicated column in the font list. You can click the Tags column header to sort the list by tag, making it easy to see all tagged fonts grouped together.

Adding and Editing Tags

You can tag one font or many at the same time. Tagging multiple fonts at once is the fastest way to apply a shared label — for example marking a whole selection as display or client-acme in one step.

Select the font(s) you want to tag. Use Shift+Click for a range or Ctrl+Click to build a non-contiguous selection.
Right-click the selection and choose Edit Tags from the context menu.
A popup window opens showing the current tags for the selected font(s). Type your tags into the field — you can enter a comma-separated list of keywords, a free-form phrase, or a combination of both.
Click OK to save. The tags column in the font list updates immediately.

Tip: When you edit tags on a multi-font selection, the tags you enter replace the existing tags on all selected fonts. To add a tag without overwriting what is already there, edit fonts one at a time — or select only fonts that currently share the same tags.

To remove all tags from a font, open the Edit Tags popup and clear the field completely, then click OK.

What to Put in a Tag

Tags can contain any text — a single word, a comma-separated list of keywords, or a full descriptive phrase. Both of these are valid tag values:

display, condensed, bold, geometric
Halloween font, creepy, decorative, dingbat

Because tag search finds text anywhere within the tag field, a descriptive phrase and a keyword list both work equally well for filtering. The difference is how readable the tags column looks when you glance at the font list — short keywords are easier to scan at a glance, while phrases can carry more nuance.

A consistent vocabulary pays off over time. Here are some starting points:

Category	Example tags
Visual style	`serif`, `sans-serif`, `slab`, `display`, `script`, `handwritten`, `monospace`, `decorative`, `dingbat`
Weight & width	`light`, `bold`, `condensed`, `extended`, `variable`
Use case	`body-text`, `headline`, `logo`, `web-safe`, `print-only`
Script coverage	`cyrillic`, `greek`, `arabic`, `cjk`, `hebrew`
Mood / theme	`elegant`, `playful`, `retro`, `technical`, `halloween`, `vintage`
Licensing	`free`, `commercial-ok`, `web-embed-ok`, `no-embed`, `client-supplied`
Project / client	`acme-corp`, `smith-agency`, `project-rebrand`

Tip: Choose a format and stick to it. A font tagged sans-serif and another tagged sans serif (with a space instead of a hyphen) will not match the same filter. Lower-case, hyphenated keywords are the easiest convention to apply consistently across a large library.

Filtering by Tag

Once fonts are tagged, you can filter the font list to show only fonts whose tag field contains a specific word or phrase. Tag filtering is available in the Filter screen — enter your tag term in the tag filter field and the list narrows in real time to matching fonts only.

A few things to know about how tag filtering works:

Partial match — the filter looks for your search term anywhere within the tag field. Searching for halloween will match a font tagged Halloween font, creepy, decorative.
Case insensitive — DISPLAY, Display and display all return the same results.
No wildcard required — because the search is already a substring match, searching for script will match fonts tagged script, handscript, and manuscript equally. Use more specific terms if you want to narrow the results.

Tip: Combine tag filtering with other filter criteria — such as font type or name — to refine large libraries quickly. For example, filtering for type OpenType and tag condensed instantly shows only condensed OpenType fonts across your entire library.

How Tags Are Stored

Tags are stored against the font file's path, not against the file itself. This means a tag applied to a font in the Browse tab will appear on the same font when you view it in the Installed tab or inside a Collection — because all three are showing the same underlying file, and the tag is looked up by path.

The practical consequence is that if a font file is moved or renamed, its tags will no longer be found at the old path. To preserve tags when relocating files, use X-Fonter's Copy & Move tools, which update stored paths (including tag associations) automatically.

Tags vs. Collections

Tags and collections solve related but different problems and work best used together:

Use a collection when you want to load or unload a specific set of fonts together — for a project, a client, or a session working set.
Use tags when you want to describe characteristics of individual fonts so you can filter across your whole library regardless of which collection a font belongs to.

A font can have both tags and belong to multiple collections simultaneously. The two systems complement each other — collections for activation, tags for discovery.