🚀 go-pugleaf

Suitcase II and WYSIWYG Menus (from Now Utilities package) give you
font menus that appear in the correct fonts, and sorted by family
(ie. B Helvetica Bold, Helvetica, and I Helvetica Italic all appear
in a hierarchical sub-menu). The only problem I have encountered with
these products is that drawing the font menu can be slow unless you
are sure to put a 12pt bitmap in the suitcase.

As to putting fonts in the System file or not, in one sense, the 
question is somewhat moot if you are one of those Mac users who
updates their system to the latest version; System 7.1 uses a
separate folder for the fonts. Using System 7.0, however, my
observations have been that it takes programs longer to load
if you have a huge system folder, but that it takes the font
menus longer to be created if you use Suitcase. So IMHO, it's
a trade off.

As to your problems printing type spec sheets, the root of the
problem lies in the way fonts are printed using a PostScript
printer. The computer downloads _each_ font used in a document
to the printer, where the outlines are rasterized into the
300 x 300 or 600 x 600 bitmap images which are printed. If your
document has a large number of fonts per page, it is impossible
to store them all in the printers memory (the number of fonts
possible varies depending on the amount of RAM in the printer).
So printing a sheet with 25 fonts in it is very difficult on
a normal PostScript printer.

My solution to this problem was very simple. Since most of the
work I do does not require PostScript, I purchased an Apple
Laser Writer LS, which is a TrueType based printer. After 
converting all my fonts to TrueType using FontMonger, I was
able to print as many fonts as I wanted on a page. The largest
disadvantage is that the rasterizing of the outline is done
by the computer and therefore takes up some of the processing
power. But for my use, this is not a problem.

As stated in another response to your query, the TypeBook,
a shareware utility, produces beautiful type specimen sheets.
It only prints one font on each page, but gives you multiple
sizes and spacings. You can find it at mac.archive.umich.edu
or sumex-aim.stanford.edu.

Another possible solution (that just now occurred to me, so I
haven't tried it) is to make your list of fonts using a word
processor, then print it to a PostScript file (I think the 
LaserWriter printer driver does this), then print the file
to a printer using a PostScript downloading program. This should
work, but no guarantees.

Hope this helps!

Jim Crawford