Font Management 2010?

[eclipse525]

I was just curious what others are using for Font Management with CS4/CS5 support?

I know the big three are Font Agent Pro, Font Explorer Pro and Suitcase Fusion. Does anyone favor one over the other at this time?

I'm personally using Font Explorer Pro at the moment and it's doing a fine job. Although, I do wish there was a lot more features, like a rich font book creation module or competent font repair/diagnostics tool, etc. Which is important for most us font mongers that have collected a large amount of fonts and have no idea the foundry/info or if they need to be weeded out due to a better version in the collection.

What are you're thoughts?


~e

 

[citizenzen]

I haven't used a font utility since Adobe ATM.

I use my basic Mac preview (spacebar) to preview fonts and drop them in my users/fonts folder to activate them.

Works like a charm.

 

[PoetCSW]

I have several thousand commercial fonts (a licensed DVD) and teach design courses. Out of necessity, I have tried the various font managers.

Linotype FontExplorer is on one our machines. It works well and we've assigned color codes to quickly ID fonts by classifications. It handles auto-activation better than Suitcase has on some projects.

Suitcase Fusion 2 (haven't tried 3) has garbled its "vault" a few times. It's really just a folder with a database. It's a pain when you've added keywords or other metadata to help locate fonts. For example, I have keywords like "Art Deco" and "Poster" to quickly find ideas for projects.

Suitcase has some great features and I like the spec sheets, but the crashes from V2 have bothered me. The upgrade to V2 resulted in various errors related to the Preference Pane. Hope V3 doesn't have similar problems.

If I didn't have the need for so many fonts, professionally, I'd strip my system down to the basics that come with various apps (still too many) and use the FontBook app.

 

[Silencio]

i've been using FontAgent / FontAgent Pro since I switched over full time from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X around the time 10.1 came out. It's been a good solid font manager that just keeps getting better and better.

I'm still a bit scarred by my bad experiences with the first OS X native versions of Suitcase. (Yes, I do have some fond memories of good old Suitcase 2.14p1 from the System 6/7 days.) I've been satisfied with FAP enough that I haven't spent much time with FontExplorer Pro. It's a bummer that it's not free anymore.

 

[macstudent]

I am a fan of suitcase fusion 3. I have not experienced the crashes that you have mentioned, but it might be from bad fonts. If you already have an older version of suitcase, you might want to try running font doctor to repair and remove bad fonts.

One of my favorite features of suitcase fusion 3 is the find similar fonts option. Select a font and it can find a bunch of fonts are share the same characteristics. If you have a tons of fonts (a I around 10,000 right now), it will help you find fonts that you forgot you even had.

 

[PoetCSW]

I am a fan of suitcase fusion 3. I have not experienced the crashes that you have mentioned, but it might be from bad fonts. If you already have an older version of suitcase, you might want to try running font doctor to repair and remove bad fonts.

The Suitcase Fusion 2 issues were documented:

http://www.extensis.com/en/support/kb_article.jsp?articleNumber=3034

Once it crashed, if you did the online update, the database would be damaged. I had this happen twice with automatic updates. You had to reinstall the full program and then reimport fonts.

Not the way to keep design customers happy.

As of May 19, 2010, the advice from Extensis when an update toasted you and FM Core stopped working:

"Trash the vault and create a new one using the option in your System Prefs > Suitcase FusionCore > New... Make sure that you copy the data of your created font sets first (File > Export sets...) so you can reimport those after creating the new database."

Yes, I salvaged my sets. I did not salvage the database, which had custom keywords and other data.

Also, you don't want to "trash the vault" if you don't have legal, easy to import copies of the fonts! A great reason to own legal copies of every font on CD or DVD.

Again, no problems in the last few months. But, I also don't do auto-updates anymore.