Panther's Fontbook is a turtle

habilis

habilis

Ministry of Re-Education
Way too slow. I'm sorry but this thing doesn't even compete with Adobe Type Manager. Don't get me wrong I really appreciate the effort but I need to open fontbook, turn a font on or off, then be back in quark in 5 seconds. I can do it in 4 seconds on a slow old 450MHz G4 with ATM installed but with a dual 1GHz with 1 gig of DDR ram I get bammed in the forehead with a beachball for a second and it takes 2 times as long, even with the font preview off. Panthers finder is faster the Jagliar, but still not fast enough. And to add salt to the wound, my god, there is no frigging hotkey to disable fonts??? If there is a hotkey for this, or a way to easily assign it, let me know ASAP so I can drag this thing out of the trashcan before it's too late.

I still don't get it after 2 years of OSX it's still slower 9.

Signed,
Disgruntled Disappointed Graphic Guy
 
The font book for me has been working awesome.

Ok the first day it sucked big time, but then, after the security update, it's been much better. I don't know why exactly but I'm finding it much more usable than i did at first glance.
 
Twister,

How many of your own fonts are you managing? I found FB to be completely unusable for large font libraries. Granted, I didn't try using it again after the security update, but I really doubt it's going to be that much better, otherwise Apple would have advertised that in the update.

Also, FB's defaults are completely absurd. BY default, it moves your original font instead of copying it. Also by default FB turns on fonts as you install them. Insane. Another insane default is that turning off font sets doesn't turn off the fonts!! What the heck were they thinking?! FB was clearly meant for casual font management. FB was the single biggest appeal to me for going Panther, so I find it quite disappointing. Fortunately, Exposé came along to kick FB's ass.

I have hopped around on all the major font managers and am now back to Suitcase X1 and loving it. It is by far the fastest manager, the only one that allows multiple font previews and has auto-activation that actually works consistently. My only issue with SC is that it simply won't render a certain percentage of fonts (like 5%). I have no idea why.

FWIW- I found FB (once you get over its quirks) to be very good for small font libraries. It is the only font manager that I have found that consistently and accurately activates fonts in Photoshop without restarting Photoshop. Here's to hoping FB grows into a better product.
 
Well I currently have 84 fonts in my font book, but I have about 1500 on my machine. I'm only adding in what i need as I go.

As far as defaults go, that's why you should configure your program before using it. I don't see any defaults as 'stupid', you have to start somewhere. But I have changed all mine to make it work like i want.
 
:)

I'll guess we'll agree to disagree. ;)

If it's a poorly chosen default, then by definition, it's stupid default. No logical designer would choose those defaults, therefore they are bad. I know many people who have lost libraries of fonts (or were highly inconvenienced) because of those incredibly bad defaults. Sure, they maybe should have paid closer attention as well as have had multiple backups, but nonetheless, Apple made a BAD choice and MANY people are paying the price for it.

As for uninstalled fonts, I spent four days trying to find the perfect font previewer so I could preview multiple uninstalled fonts outside of FB and then install them for use, as you are doing by need only. The closest app I could find for that purpose was Fontage, but in the end I found it unusable as well. Not one of those preview apps provides all of the following (which are critical for me to use them): Opentype support, Uninstalled preview support, multiple font comparison support AND loads in a reasonable time. Fontage was the closest, but its loading time was in the end unbearable unless you are willing to remove your font sets before quitting and load them in again as you want to preview. Again, Suitcase is far and away the best at this and does all four of those requirements perfectly.

Glad to hear you're enjoying it and have it working for you. Maybe I'll give it a go again in the future.
 
Font Book is DOG slow. I made the mistake of loading the Adobe Font Folio 9 into it, and it took the better part of 10 minutes to add the fonts. Luckily, I had the fonts on a separate drive, so no matter what the option was to either copy or move the fonts, it copied them. I'm guessing it won't MOVE a font file if it resides on a different volume -- only copy it if that's the case.

There are no options about what to do when you add fonts -- it activates them upon addition, no way around it. Simply crappy behavior.

Suitcase X1 served its purpose VERY well for me under 10.2.8, but I get flaky behavior under 10.3. Extensis has released a statement saying that X1 is not compatible with 10.3, but they won't say to what extent. I can get it to run and activate fonts, but it still acts flaky -- quitting unexpectedly, taking eons to load up, etc.
 
Wow, I did not realize that Extensis says X1 is not 10.3 compatible. It's running better than ever for me (tho I haven't used it in a year as I was trying Font Agent Pro). Doesn't crash, auto-activates properly in AI/InDesign. Loads in about five seconds (2,000 fonts). Very fast previewing. Nearly perfect.

Machine is Original DP 1 gig, 1 gig ram, 10.3 with all updates. Also have it on a poky G4 466 and it runs great there as well (slower of course, but still very reasonable). We did have some trouble initially installing it and loading fonts on the 466, but now it's fine.
 
Yeah, I installed it before I even heard of any incompatibilities, and aside from having to force-quit it the first time it launched (it gave me a neverending beachball) it ran just fine. Some actions would make it crash immediately, and I don't remember exactly what, but for all intents and purposes it ran fine.

I just remember seeing something on Macfixit.com or Macnn.com that was an email from Extensis that said that Suitcase X1 was currently incompatible with 10.3 and they were working on either a patch or upgrade to rememdy that.

For now, Font Book seems to be handling 1,500 fonts fine, it's just a tad on the slow side...
 
habilis said:
Way too slow.

I still don't get it after 2 years of OSX it's still slower 9.

Signed,
Disgruntled Disappointed Graphic Guy
Click to expand...

Font Book is really fast on my G4/400 PCI. Indeed, Panther is much faster than
OS 9. I don't get it, what are you guys doing to make it go so slow ? Maybe a clean install would help ?
 
I've got a G4/400 PCI machine (well, it's actually 500MHz now with an upgrade) and Font Book is slower than molasses.

Dekatophil: try throwing an excess of 1,000 fonts at Font Book. You'll see what we're talking about.
 
UPDATE

Amazingly font book opened 450 fonts in seconds on on my coworkers G4 400!! We had just upgraded and done a clean install of 10.3 and the fonts were added manually to the users font folder When we opened up font book for the first time, it took seconds to display them all. 1gig of ram probably didn't hurt any.

I was just surprised on how fast it was!!
 
Extensis Suitcase X1 (with newest updates) runs fast on Panther on an iBook G3/800. Way fast. Good. Workable for a graphics pro. FontBook is version 1.0 and is a 'nice try'. Apple will quite surely update it in 10.4, but until then, Suitcase's the way to go.
 
The one thing I've had problems with on Panther is fonts. I've had a few (or a lot sometimes) disappearing randomly and having to install them again with Font Book which doesn't work as well as I hoped. I know it's not meant to compete with Suitcase but it could be better. The added ease of use and functionality Apple have tried to add with it is bit of hinderance. At least in OS9 if I dragged a bunch of fonts into my Fonts folder, they worked, end of story.
 
Font book gave me some weird problems, such as missing characters from published Flash movies. I used it for 2 days after i got panther, and that was that, back to Font Reserve.
 
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