mark / April 11, 2005 @ 12:51 pm

I have to say that I am a mac user and I do have “Font Book” that was included in my OSX package and it works fine. And no I don’t have money to blow on crappy PC proprietary software. Because face it; thats where it is heading—everyone will be wanting UNIX based freeware and nobody will want to pay for windows apps.

joey / April 11, 2005 @ 1:06 pm

if you’re a mac user why would you buy “PC proprietary software” anyway?

Sam / April 11, 2005 @ 3:30 pm

FontAgent Pro wins it for me. Like you said, the others, while they may be free are just crappy. And Suitcase is a nightmare.

However, I think $100 was well spent here.. especially when your going to be using an app like this all day, every day!

Jeff / April 11, 2005 @ 4:48 pm

Ah, I remember the day I tried to use Apple’s FontBook to manage my fonts. As I dragged my “Fonts” folder onto the FontBook main window, the spinning beach ball showed up and my processor got pegged at 100%. For an hour. And it did nothing; not one font was copied into the system.

And then I tried it again. The same thing happened.

The point is that FontBook is a joke if you have a bunch of typefaces, where a bunch means thousands. It’s probably fine for users with a limited font set. I hope that Apple can beef up the software in Tiger, but I doubt they’ll get anywhere near the featureset of FontAgent Pro.

Alex / April 12, 2005 @ 7:53 am

Yeah, FontBook doesn’t work for managing a great many fonts. It’s not what I would call robust. But it does fine for managing smaller sets. I tend to just keep my fonts uninstalled in a folder, and then create seperate folders for specific projects and then just drag those into fontbook as needed. I’m sure FontAgent Pro does a better job, but since I tend to work on one or two design projects at a time, this approach works fine. That being said, I’ll Jeff’s hope that FontBook is strengthened in Tiger.

spudart / April 12, 2005 @ 11:53 am

What about Extensis Suitcase? It’s what i use at work to manage thousands of fonts. It’s pretty good. Not as good as ATM Deluxe. But Adobe won’t make it for OS X. Adobe is pretty crazy for that. They should release an OS X version of ATM Deluxe and make it work for Adobe InDesign and not Quark. Then Quark will surely go down the tubes.

Stephen / April 12, 2005 @ 12:04 pm

Most folks who use Suitcase haven’t tried FontAgent Pro.

Jeff / April 12, 2005 @ 1:43 pm

I used Suitcase versions 8-11, so I was really reticent to try FontAgent Pro just because I didn’t want to mess up my work setup. IMO, nothing is more frustrating than the first install of font management software. Say what you will about Suitcase, but you can get the job done with it, no doubt about it. Well, there was that time that I turned on two different Zapf Dingbats versions and it crashed…

Luckily, I had a more adventurous friend who tried it and told me about how much better it was than Suitcase (response time, less crashing, all the other stuff previously mentioned). I’m glad I trusted his opinion.

It’s not everyday that you use a piece of software and think “good lord, this software makes me happy”. FontAgent Pro really gave me that reaction the first few months I used it.

Kevin / April 12, 2005 @ 3:51 pm

Any idea how the alternatives compare to Suitcase for the PC?

eyolf / April 13, 2005 @ 2:33 pm

I finally managed to download, install, and run the Bitstream Font Manager, and fine as it works, I’m still not ready to make the switch from FontExpert and Total Commander’s font plugins, for the following reasons:
1. It is more a font Manager than a font Viewer, which is ok, and it doesn’t promise more either, but I still find it a drag that the charmap is at least two clicks away, hidden in a tab in the properties window.
2. Once you get there, the character display apparently only shows the ansi characters. I need more than that.
3. It would have been nice to have some way of showing more than one font at the time.
But, as I said, the font management functions seem to be exellent, and it works very fast even with large font collections.

John / April 13, 2005 @ 4:54 pm

Font Book has actually casued my whole system to bite it, resulting in my having to re-install OSX.

7443 / April 13, 2005 @ 5:45 pm

You just right click and “Explore” the font. This opens a new (permanent) window that you can customize. Just open as many as necessary, a new window for each font you want to compare.

Jeff / April 13, 2005 @ 11:51 pm

Crap!

…although I’m not surprised.

eyolf / April 14, 2005 @ 7:03 am

Yes, I found that function, but I still think it’s cumbersome to have to open a separate window, resize that, drag the various open windows around, etc, when all I want is to see a short text sample in different fonts…
That said, I’m beginning to like it more and more. Thanks for the tip, whoever came up with it.

KJ / April 14, 2005 @ 12:23 pm

For PC users, I *really* like OT1, which supports open type, type 1, and truetype. Find it at http://www.ot1fontmanager.com/en/

It’s got a fast, customizable display, supports font sets, and performs reliably and quickly. If FontHit can match it, it’s worthwhile looking into. But don’t miss trying out OT1.

Stephen / May 6, 2005 @ 1:00 am

I haven’t tried it yet, but Typecast looks nifty for pure font viewing on OS X Tiger.

forrest / May 6, 2005 @ 4:40 am

I think that FontAgent Pro is the best thing out there, but it’s not perfect. It deserves singling out for being pretty much the only font-management solution for Mac OS X that’s in active development. Extensis doesn’t look like it had any of its products ready for Tiger’s launch, and hasn’t done anything with either Suitcase or Font Reserve in quite a while. Meanwhile, FontAgent Pro continues to improve, while still being the most usable thing out there.

forrest / May 6, 2005 @ 4:42 am

What I’d really like is a font-viewing program that not only allowed me to view uninstalled fonts, but allowed me to do so without crashing every third time I tried to use it.

aphrospice / July 4, 2005 @ 11:35 am

I dont think alienating Mac users is the way to go here.

We all know that monopolies manufacturing on the cheap isnt always the best. Lets just get over that fact and behave like civil human beings.

joey / July 4, 2005 @ 11:40 am

i wasn’t trying to alieniate anyone, i just had no idea what mark was talking about.

Foppa / March 11, 2006 @ 5:05 am

Hi Fontgurus,
does anyone now if there is a software that can create and print preview lists with uninstalled postscript fonts.

We serveral thousand fonts thats not activated.

A software that could create fontbooks of all the fonts on a harddisk would save us a lot of time….

Thanks from a crisp and blueskye clear winter in Sweden!

/Foppa ;-)

Senior Designer & Creative Directo

Gordon / March 14, 2006 @ 9:13 am

Every Mac user that is serious about fonts should check out the excellent (and free!) Linotype FontExplorer X. The 1.0 version was finally released today, though I had been using the beta for quite awhile with no problems.

http://www.linotype.com/fontexplorerX