Our Review:

FontMatrix is the current heavyweight in this category. It is the largest and most complex application and runs on a wider range of platforms. It is primarily developed for Linux but has versions for Windows and Mac OS X. It would be more highly rated except that the Windows version has some bugs and is not very easy to use.

FontMatrix is more complex and has more high-end features than other font managers. You can activate fonts in tagged groups, view many sample texts in many languages, classify fonts using PANOSE, view and compare glyphs, find a font from a raster, extract fonts from PDF files, and test layouts in a free-form "playground". Some of these features of FontMatrix are not available in any of the other programs.

Yet, FontMatrix needs to do some of the basics a lot better. Tagging of fonts to create groups is inflexible. For example, you are best to tag fonts when you import them otherwise you'll be tagging fonts one by one later on. File management is non existent: no copy, move, delete, or rename of font files. Previewing installed fonts works fine but you can't preview some of those font types in folder view.