Font Runner is a font manager for Windows targeted at artists and graphic designers. Its purpose is to easily organize and search font collections.
The Font Runner Overview page from the former Crux site is still available through this blog.
Open Source
The source code for Font Runner has been released under the GPL v3 license and is hosted on Bitbucket.
To get Font Runner, visit the Font Runner Downloads Page.
History
Back around the year 2000, I was primarily involved with running Crux Technologies and busy fulfilling contracts for custom programming and web site jobs. We had a computer that was used primarily for graphic design work that had lots of fonts installed on it; however, anytime we needed to look at fonts on this machine, we had problems. It was difficult and time-consuming.
As a result, I created a program that performed two main functions. First, it allowed us to quickly look through fonts. Second, it allowed fonts to be used in any running application even if they were not installed.
At the time, there didn’t seem to any shareware or freeware programs that were focused on the same features, so, I polished the program a bit and released it to the public.
Right before release, I happened across another program that had the same name I was going to use, so I changed the name of the program to Font Runner. As luck would have it, the domain name, fontrunner.com was available too.
On December 18, 2000 I released Font Runner 1.0 Beta 1. After getting lots of great feedback, I made Font Runner’s first official release on April 9, 2001. Thanks to continued feedback from Font Runner users, it enjoyed regular updates over the years, but time constraints eventually eroded my ability to work on it. Rather than just sit on the code, I open sourced it with the hope of breathing new life into it. I chose the GPL to ensure it remains free and open.
