Typographi has a post on Grad­ing the New Font “Features” in OS X Leop­ard. There is some good infor­ma­tion on font improve­ments that I haven’t heard about else­where. The fea­ture to print out Font Book pages sounds nice.

The fea­ture that really got me excited¹ though was this:

Auto­mat­i­cally acti­vate fonts as you need them. When an appli­ca­tion requests an installed font that’s cur­rently dis­abled, Leop­ard acti­vates that font and keeps it active until the request­ing appli­ca­tion quits.

If this fea­ture actu­ally works and works well with lots of fonts, it’s easily got to be one of the killer fea­tures of Leop­ard. Seam­less font auto-​activation built into the os is worth the price of admis­sion alone. How many other font man­age­ment appli­ca­tions cost money and don’t really work (other than of course Font­Ex­plorer X, which is free)?

I’m not hold­ing my breath though.

1. By excited I mean pes­simisti­cally hope­ful.↩