[FAQ] Font Book vs. Other font management sftwre

N

nyuchi

Registered
I need to purchase font management software asap for OS X -- however I hear that Panther has got this "Font Book" which is supposedly good enough to replace ATM or Extensis Suitcase. Anyone out there have any experience int he comparison of these? Please note: I am still using Quark in the classic environment, so I need font activation in both.

I am a little bitter to go and buy the 10.3 software at full retail, considering my machine is less than 6 mo. old, but will do so if this font book is what its cracked up to be...
 
Font book seems a bit buggy for now and not up to the quality of suitcases yet. Also I don't think the Panther font book will be of any use to you in Classic environment so it looks like Suitcases is the option for you, at least for now...

nyuchi said:
I need to purchase font management software asap for OS X -- however I hear that Panther has got this "Font Book" which is supposedly good enough to replace ATM or Extensis Suitcase. Anyone out there have any experience int he comparison of these? Please note: I am still using Quark in the classic environment, so I need font activation in both.

I am a little bitter to go and buy the 10.3 software at full retail, considering my machine is less than 6 mo. old, but will do so if this font book is what its cracked up to be...
Click to expand...
 
FB won't compete with professional management, obviously. Apple is not aiming at replacing existing, cash-generating programs !

But FB is quite nice for low-end users, indeed.
I still use ATM Deluxe on MAC OS 9 ! Yeah baby, this still exists.
 
I just wanted to put another player into the game.

If you're looking for a good font management program, don't pass up FontAgent Pro without checking it out.

I believe you can download a free trial to take it for a spin.

It's the "new kid" on the block, but it's gaining popularity fast.

Find it at Insider Software
 
thanks for all your insight. I was just going to ask about FontAgent Pro -- cause someone else told me to check it out. I am in the testing process right now, but so far so good. I might be sold on FontAgent.

I am curious if anyone else out there has full experience with FontAgent Pro??? please share...
 
I have used all pro font managers at great length (except Juggler, which just recently became OS X ready). Anyway, this is just my opinion, but here it is:

There is no perfect font manager. They all have compromises. IMHO, Suitcase is the leader of the pack, though I am still continually plagued by fonts that simply won't preview (other apps preview them fine). Really irritating. All part of that "no perfect FM" I was talking about. To my knowledge, Suitcase is STILL the only manager that allows multiple font viewing for comparison. Here's a clue to the competition, DESIGNERS LIKE TO COMPARE FONTS TO EACH OTHER.

Font Agent Pro was my choice for the last nine months, but man is that thing slow. The auto-activation is very quirky and I could never get it to work in Photoshop. Only reason I stuck with it was because it previewed all my fonts properly unlike Suitcase. Installing fonts in FAP is one of life's worst experiences. Second only to installing fonts (I'm talking lots of fonts, like low thousands) in Font Book.I wasted this entire weekend, like a dozen hours, trying to get FB to work well with two thousand fonts. What was I thinking? Don't waste your time.

Font Reserve was OK, I just didn't like its interface and it had its own laundry list of flat out bugs.

Suitcase databases fonts very quickly, now has built-in quicksearch, multiple font comparisons and runs well on DP G4s or better. Not so swift on older boxes. Course, nothing in OS X runs swiftly on older boxes, so it's no exception.

I am really disappointed in FB's performance. REALLY disappointed. Everything else about it (except only being able to view one font at a time) is really good.
 
mindbend:

Are you saying the only main cons to FontAgent Pro are:

1) Its Slow
2) You can't view 2 fonts simultaneously
3) Auto Activation in Photoshop is faulty

so that means Suitcase is really that much speedier?? I didn't really care about fonts installing on FAP -- I just decided to take a lunch break, though it did probably take about a half hour or more just to import 4000+ fonts...

And I've never used the "viewing 2 fonts simultaneously" feature -- so I guess I didn't know what I was missing.

And so far I haven't noticed problems with my photoshop, but I still have to do a series of tests.

what it comes down to is really would like to support the small guys if you know what I mean...so while I am rooting for FAP, I am also trying to be cautious and make sure to purchase the best professional app...
 
If you want more information about FontAgent Pro from people who are sold on it, pay a visit to the Adobe User to User forums. You should be able to search the InDesign and Photoshop forums for FontAgent.

Font activation in FAP for Adobe software is a work in progress. I have no problem with the way the auto-activation works now, but the developers are working to make it better.

As for the way FAP manages fonts, it seems to be right up there with rest. No font management for OS X is perfect but more and more people are moving over to FontAgent all the time.
 
nyuchi-

And there's one other small negative against FAP. If you keep your fonts organized into folders like OpenType/Sans Serif, TrueType/Script, you have to import those folders one at a time in order for FAP to maintain that organization, otherwise it just jumbles them all into one folder. I need to keep my fonts more organized so I can use one technology over another (e.g. Final Cut doesn't natively recognize Postscript or Opentype). With Suitcase, you can just drag in a whole selection of folders and Suitcase will make folder sets that reflect them.

I'm not dissing FAP, it's a good program. I used it exclusively for nine months or more. Just for kicks I decided to go back to Suitcase X1 over the weekend and found it to be WAY faster, more refined and every bit as good as FAP with the only exception being that it can't preview about 5-10% of the fonts, which is quite a bug, I admit. I'm still trying to figure out if it's just me, if I've got a bunch of corrupt fonts, if I've got some conflicting shareware or what. For example, For the last three years, in all of its iterations, Suitcase has never been able to preview Adobe Woodcut font. That's one of my most used fonts!

Another plus for Suitcase is its very excellent font duplicate management which creates a summary report and you simply click on which fonts you want to deactivate to avoid conflict.

To be fair, I'm sure there are some very good FAP benefits, they're just not coming to me right now (other than more consistent font previewing ability). If someone can remind me of them, let's discuss. It's a pretty good app.

I'll be installing Suitcase on two other machines today, which have far less additional software, so they should be more inclined to not cause preview errors unless it's just Suitcase.

Also, keep in mind that Extensis wil be merging the best technologies of Suitcase and Font Reserve "soon", which could be very nice. I have no details of what will come of that, though.
 
I've used all major font management software as well, for over 15 years. Starting with System 4 all the way through OS 10.3.

I will never in my life own Suitcase. It's the buggiest, most system dragging font management tool out there. Font Agent pro works wonderfully, it's not slow here and it features the ability to repair damaged fonts as well, something Suitcase has never offered to any real extent. In addition FAP has no extra plug ins and generally runs almost as if invisible, something all font management packages should do.

The auto-activation for FAP works flawlessly here in Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPress, Indesign, and all other software.

Extensis does not support any software packjage the way Insider Software supports FAP. I've had issues fixed in a matter of minutes with Insider Software. Extensis will never match that.

I understand a great many users have Suitcase, but one has to wonder, it's just becasue Suitcase was the first OSX native Font Manager. I honestly feel both Font Reserve and FAP are better than Suitcase.

As for Font Book, it's okay for less than 50 fonts that you want active most of the time, but it's in no way a professional font management tool.


Just my 2¢. Others will, of course, disagree.



Jolten
-------------
Creative Director
Member: National Association of Photoshop Profesionals.
 
I'm a 'Suitcaser' since OS X 10.0 (as it was the first option that popped up for OS X afaik). I've had plenty of bugs with it over the time, but version Suitcase X1 seems quite good, as were the latest versions of Suitcase 10.x.
I _hope_ that Apple fixes FontBook, as I'd really _like_ to use it instead. I don't care about Classic applications any more (which was a good reason to buy Suitcase at the beginning), and we shouldn't forget that FontBook 1.0 is just that: a 1.0 version.
 
I'm always amazed at the vastly different experiences people have with their machines and software, especially with font managers in this case.

For example, in my case [ keep in mind, I run these managers on four different machines concurrently], FAP simply doesn't auto-activate fonts in Photoshop at all. I have no idea why. Also, FAP will not activate a font in Photoshop unless I quit Photoshop first. Four machines do this. As for FAP in InDesign, nine out of ten times, I have to load my ID file, close it and load it again for the fonts to kick in. Four machines do this. Illustrator works as expected. I don't use Quark any more, so I don't know how it works there.

Also, installing thousands of fonts in FAP takes forever because of all the corruption detection presumably. X1 is amazingly fast at loading fonts. Also, it's much smarter (you can drag in five folders and X1 will use those folder names as font sets, FAP bunches them all into one). X1 now has Font Doctor, which works brilliantly and much faster than FAP (though it is a separate application and requires a separate step). And, AFAIK, there is no server version of FAP (or is there?).

As for plugins, FAP absolutely has plugins. Just like Suitcase.

I did hop on Suitcase when it first became OS X ready, but it was indeed still buggy. X1 is very solid and very fast on four machines here.

I'm not necessarily trashing FAP, I used it exclusively for a year. It's solid, if slow and, for me, not fully operational. Their support is far better than Extensis's, but I've never needed support for either product. Insider Software better stay on the ball, because with Extensis merging X1 and FR, there is no reason why that shouldn't easily be the best Font Manager available bar none.

And what the heck is up with Alsoft and Juggler? No demo? What are they thinking? That product has no chance in hell without a demo, and a slim chance even with one. It's a good thing for them they make the best utility in the world (Diskwarrior), because they're not going to make a penny on Juggler.
 
I am finding that it is extremely slow, and that the auto activation does not work in my Photoshop either. I am also running the trial version, but I am not totally impressed. I guess the next step is to download the trial version of Suitcase to compare for myself.

It is amazing how so many different people really can have such different experiences on similiar machines. Sometimes it makes me wonder if they are working for the company or what...
 
So now I am in Suitcase X1, and I generally love the layout and its intended functionality, but there are some major issues. Upon opening it the first time it had some extremely buggy behavior, my named sets would return to "Untitled" and I had it crash 3 times due to 3 different bad fonts (and this is after running font doctor, which took almost a half a day!!) and then it completely stopped letting me preview at all!

I am concerned maybe it was a bad install, so maybe I need to just do it again. Also, I'm on panther now, you think that might have anything to do with it?
 
nyuchi,

I certainly can't deny that you are having some serious trouble, therefore, to you, X1 is probably a piece of junk. Other people have had similar issues. This is unfortuante, because I've got it running on four machines flawlessly. Font Doctor checked out almost 2000 fonts in minutes, nowhere near the half a day hell you endured. I don't why there is such a wide degree of success and failure with X1.

It seems like there is something conflicting that Extensis hasn't worked out yet. The only thing I can say that may help is that I installed X1 on all machines that had just been freshly upgraded (pure clean install hard drive wipe) with Panther.

I sure hope Extensis works out the kinks, cuz when it works, it's the best out there. When it doesn't, it's a useless piece of junk.
 
I've missed something, somewhere - saw it in the advertising and on the Apple OSX Panther site. But how do you actually access FontBook? I've looked , but I can't find it!

Dare I say it? - I'm not stupid - there's something wrong with the interface and general preferences if it isn't obvious. How on earth is the average user going to find it? Although, from what I read above, I'm not missing much!
 
Arden--On a good machine I would think 200 fonts would be workable in FB. Some early tests with smaller font sets in that range seemed to be OK, if not blazing. Don't hold me to that though.


porteus--FontBook is in the Applications folder.
 
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