Apple has posted a list of 300+ features in Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X. Of course not all of them are groundbreaking, and sometimes the best new features can be simple tweaks to make things easier to use.

Having heard nothing so far about fonts, I jumped right down to the new font features which turned out to be less than stellar. The printable font book is a welcome edition (though it really shouldn't have taken three versions to get it) and likewise the addition of Tahoma, Microsoft San Serif and Arial Unicode probably should have come sooner.

Having accidently deleted system fonts (which can lead to applications not displaying text right and can pretty much break them), the system font protection feature is a good one, but I really wanted more.

There's mention of a language grouping feature, but will it do any more than the current collections feature? Right now you can create font groups in Font Book, but you can't actually do anything useful with them. For example, as a web designer and developer, I created a font group named "Web" that I put the usual suspects in. Arial, Georgia, and all the fonts that you'll find pre-installed on both mac and windows.

The catch of this is the group I made isn't usable in Photoshop, Illustrator, Word or most the apps I use. Instead I still just have an alphabetically ordered menu with every font I have installed forcing me to scroll through everything else to get at the font I need. A simple submenu at the top of the list, showing my custom groups as submenus before the full list, would do the trick.

I was hoping to see some real improvements with font management, but there's a lot else I still look forward to in Leopard and hopefully Apple will take font management seriously next time around.