Dive into MasterJuggler

July 17, 2003

MasterJuggler 3.0 was just released last week. Here’s my report. Mind you, I’m assuming basic familiarity with font management. If you have never purchased an extra font beyond what came with your computer, you can probably skip this entry.

Note: If you bought MasterJuggler and it came with a serial number than begins with “R” I’ll save you the phone call to Alsoft. Change the “R” to a “G” and it will work.

Now my review -

What’s good:

* It doesn’t have any noticeable effect on other applications while it’s running (as opposed to FontAgent Pro which slowed some of my applications to a painful crawl of spinning beach balls).
* You can see samples of multiple fonts in one window. Click on a set on the left, samples of a single line of text of all fonts are on the right. This is great when you have a look in mind and you want to see how a company’s name looks in all different fonts.
* Like Suitcase, it activates fonts in place instead of moving them to a specialized database or directory. I think this is why it’s not dragging down the system.
* It does font checking. FontReserve said it did, but FontReserve never met a font it didn’t add no matter how messed up it was.
* Within each window, it’s rather fast. (it slows down in switching between panes).
* Alsoft said it shouldn’t have any problem running in Panther (FontReserve had to be updated with every major system release)

What’s bad (or at least needs some work):

* No auto activation (the Alsoft rep said it’s coming in the next version)
* There’s no way of telling at a glance which fonts are activated. If I’ve activated a bunch of fonts to design a page, I’d like to be able to quickly deactivate ones that I don’t need so they don’t clutter up the menus in other applications.
* There’s no “find” function (or filters). I know I want to activate Palatino. I have to either click on my library of 3,000+ fonts and scroll down to “P” or find the set that also contains the font and click on it there. I would love to be able to “find” Palatino. Or all TrueType fonts that begin with the letter “P”. FontReserve is the winner here.
* It’s a little awkward when moving between the panes. Look at the interface:

In the first pane “files” you see all the fonts by family. That’s great. I don’t care whether it’s OS X or Classic, so I removed that column. Let’s say I selected “Helvetica” from halfway down the list. I click on it. Now I want to see what it looks like. I click on the “Waterfall” pane which shows fonts in a variety of sizes (I could also click on “Sample” to a see a single line in comparison to other fonts). When the Waterfall pane loads (which happens slowly, probably due to the size of my library), all fonts are deselected and the scroll bar is at the top of the list! So if I want to see Helvetica, I have to scroll down the list. Page down key does not work as the focus is in the blank window. It’s redundant and more than a bit annoying. I should be able to click on a font in one pane, and have it be selected in the next pane.

* It has font checking. It doesn’t have font fixing. It’s more than happy to tell you what problems it finds with your fonts. But then you manually have to go to the font’s original folder and deal with the problem.

Bottom line: MasterJuggler is adequate, and for what it does better than other font managers it does very well. But it’s more like MasterJuggler 1.0 for OS X than a true version 3 application. I’m tolerant and hopeful for its future. I’m not in love.

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