More about fonts

July 17, 2003

As you know, I’ve been in search of Mac OS X font nirvana, and I haven’t found it yet. I’m a font junkie. I knew that I wanted to be a graphic designer back in middle school where I would doodle alphabets all over my papers. Anyway, after years of Mac ownership I now have about 3,500 fonts give or take. Maybe more on CDs that I haven’t added to the hard drive.

Yesterday at Macworld, the Apple booth had rows of G5s with Apple employees there to demonstrate how the G5 works with specific applications. One was labeled “Font Management.” In particular, he was demonstrating FontReserve Server and I think Suitcase. After confirming that the man in the Apple t-shirt was indeed an Apple employee (rather than a local sub-contractor that Apple hired just for the expo) I asked him about font management in Panther. I told him that I worked in InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator and I had tried all the font management programs and none were perfect. Would Panther’s FontBook fit the bill? His answer (and I’m pretty close to quoting here): “No. Serious graphic designers with large font libraries will be disappointed in FontBook. It’s more for the casual user who wants to organize 60 or so fonts.” I said, “So, it’s like what iPhoto is to Photoshop?” and he said, “Exactly.” I said, “But Steve Jobs made it sound like the answer to ‘professional’ graphic designer’s prayers!” and the guy just shrugged.

::sigh::

So it’s back to the 3rd party stuff.

You name the font utility, and I can show you my license for some version of it.

Suitcase: This was the first font utility I ever used. It was under System 7 in 1992. I think it was called Suitcase II back then.

MasterJuggler: This was also under System 7. I stopped using Suitcase because it wasn’t stable. MasterJuggler was stable, but the interface was confusing.

Adobe Type Manager Deluxe: The strength of this one was that it worked with ATM and it was the first to have auto activation.

Font Reserve: I’ve had a hate, love, hate relationship with FontReserve. I tried version 1.0 after seeing a demo at a Macworld or Seybold conference. But that first version was very buggy on my system. So buggy, that I only used it for a few days and then asked for a refund (I bought it with a guarantee from DiamondSoft). I went back to ATM Deluxe for a while. Then FontReserve 2 came out and folks were raving about it, so I decided to try the demo again. It was much, much improved. I repurchased the program and used it for the next 3 or 4 years, making the transition to OS X and FontReserve 3.

But as my font collection grew, FontReserve started to show its age. It was fine for activating/deactivating fonts and it had some nice features, but I was running into system instability and database errors. Fonts wouldn’t preview, sample books were hard to print, etc. I got the sense from FontReserve’s website that the application had been abandoned. In fact, Extensis (the makers of Suitcase) recently purchased FontReserve. Whether they’re going to roll its features into a super-Suitcase or kill it off completely remains to be seen.

Font Agent Pro: I tried this one on the recommendation of some folks in the InDesign mailing list. Font Agent Pro has some nice features. It’s based on the shareware-turned-commercial Font Agent (same developer, of course). FontAgent Pro does a much, much better job of examining and fixing font problems than FontReserve did. My fonts have never been in better physical shape, and the problems I had in InDesign and Word completely disappeared. I bought an upgrade license (I had a version years ago). Then things started going south. FontAgent Pro itself was fine. But other applications dragged terribly. Particularly Internet Explorer, Studiometry (a killer freelance management app) and Color Consultant Pro. It takes forever to startup and shut down. I’m sure it’s fine for small collections of fonts. But I have 2,700 fonts in one library and about 800 in another.

MasterJuggler: Which leads us back to the OS X version of MasterJuggler, just released. As I posted earlier, I bought it yesterday. I’ll dig into it in my next entry.

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