Font-Management Tools

As a designer, you have to deal with more fonts than most people can imagine. Since you regularly exchange documents with other people, and shuffle fonts onto your Mac and then to other designers and agencies, you need a font-management application. Without a font manager, your library will soon grow to an unmanageable level, fonts with similar names will conflict and refuse to work, and it will be nearly impossible to be sure you are using the correct font for your projects.

All of these applications do their best to automatically open the correct version of a font for you, and let you create sets to organize your font collection, preview typefaces, and manually enable or disable specific fonts.

Tip

Some of the fonts that end up in your collection may have been passed around so many times that you can't figure out where they really came from. Since you can't verify the quality or condition of these fonts, font managers check to see if the fonts you are activating are damaged in any way and alert you to potential problems. Damaged fonts can cause stability problems with Tiger, the Adobe Creative Suite, and QuarkXPress.

Suitcase

Extensis purchased Font Reserve from DiamondSoft and combined it with Suitcase to create a single font-management application called Suitcase Fusion (www.extensis.com; $99.95) (Figure 2.2). The application interface more closely matches the older Suitcase X1, but the font database engine is from Font Reserve. That means you get the best of both worlds: Many designers preferred the Suitcase interface but considered Font Reserve's font-management style to be superior.

Figure 2.2. Suitcase Fusion combines the best features from Suitcase X1 and Font Reserve into one unified font-management application.

Suitcase supports auto-activation of fonts in Adobe InDesign and Illustrator, and in QuarkXPress, but not in Adobe Photoshop. Auto-activation lets Suitcase find the correct version of the fonts used in your documents and automatically open them for you. If there's more than one font with the same name in its database, Suitcase will do its best to match the correct version to your document.

Suitcase also manages system fonts so that you can use a font even if it has the same name as one that Tiger loads at startup. For example, if a client gives you a specific version of Helvetica for its annual report you are designing, Suitcase can temporarily disable Tiger's Helvetica so that you can use your client's version.

Tip

For some designers, the font manager they use is dictated by company policy. If you have the option, however, choose the font manager that works best for you. Suitcase and FontAgent Pro are both available in one-month trial versions, so you can find the one that best fits your needs.

FontAgent Pro

Insider Software's FontAgent Pro (www.insidersoftware.com; $99.95) works like Suitcase Fusion, but with a few special features of its own (Figure 2.3). FontAgent Pro makes it easy to open specific styles in a font. If you want to use the italic style from Avant Garde Book, you don't have to open the entire font. Instead, you can open just the italic style. It also manages system fonts.

Figure 2.3. FontAgent Pro is a powerful font manager that also offers basic font-sharing capabilities.

This font manager also includes font-sharing capabilities (Figure 2.4). With font sharing enabled, other designers using FontAgent Pro on your network can subscribe to your fonts and use them as if they were installed on the designers' own workstations. It also lets you auto-activate your fonts in the Adobe Creative Suite applications and QuarkXPress, build multiple font libraries, create sets, and check for conflicts, and it's the only font manager that auto-activates in Photoshop.

Figure 2.4. FontAgent Pro's Sharing pane displays the fonts on your Mac on the left and shared fonts from other Macs on the right.

Tip

If you work with one or two other designers in your office, FontAgent Pro's font sharing is an easy and inexpensive way to make sure that everyone is using the same fonts for their projects.

FontExplorer X

Linotype entered the font-management market in 2006 with FontExplorer X (www.linotype.com), which has the unique advantage of being free (Figure 2.5). Even though Linotype doesn't charge for FontExplorer X, it's still a full-featured professional font-management application. It supports auto-activation in most applications and includes flexible font-organization capabilities, but it does not manage system fonts for you.

Figure 2.5. FontExplorer X may be free, but it's still a powerful font manager, and you can purchase fonts you don't already own from inside the application.

It just wouldn't be right to expect Linotype to invest the resources in developing an application like this without getting anything in return. In this case, payment takes the form of a font-purchasing feature built into the application. If you need to purchase a new font for a project, you can use FontExplorer X to find, pay for, and download the font. The first time you buy a font, FontExplorer helps you set up a Linotype account to manage your credit card and transaction information. It also alerts you to missing fonts in your documents and offers to find and purchase the fonts from one of several affiliate type foundries.

The downside to FontExplorer X is that Linotype developed the application to promote font purchases from its product line as well as from several affiliate foundries. If Linotype doesn't see an acceptable return on its investment, it has no incentive to continue developing the product. Should the company drop its font manager at some time, you will be stuck with an unsupported application, and switching to a different font manager can be a real headache.

Font Book

Mac OS X includes its own font-management application, called Font Book (Figure 2.6). Although it does let you activate and deactivate fonts, organize your font collection into sets, and preview type, it does not support auto-activation. Other applications, such as Suitcase Fusion and FontAgent Pro, activate fonts by telling the operating system to reference the fonts from a database that the manager maintains. Font Book, in comparison, actually moves fonts in and out of the Font folder inside your Library folder.

Figure 2.6. Apple's Font Book ships with Mac OS X and offers basic font-management capabilities. Although it's easy to use, it lacks some key features, such as font auto-activation.

Although Font Book's method of physically moving fonts around your Mac works, it's not considered the best way to manage your fonts, and it is noticeably slower than the methods used by other font managers we've discussed. Professional designers need professional tools, and Font Book doesn't make the grade.