Close to a year ago now I made the deci­sion to tran­si­tion the 34 com­puter lab (all Macs) that I manage to a new font man­age­ment appli­ca­tion. We had been using Font Reserve for many years. It worked (kind of¹), but was ugly and stu­dents found it hard to use. The biggest prob­lem though was that the appli­ca­tion hadn’t been updated in sev­eral years. In fact, the last update was a [poor] port to OS X from the OS9 version.

Last Spring we updated all of the com­put­ers to Tiger. Exten­sis (the man­u­fac­turer of Font Reserve) had just released Suit­case Fusion, which was to be the con­sol­i­da­tion of Font Reserve and Suit­case. We got the memo, Font Reserve is dead. I had high hopes for Suit­case Fusion, which had gotten some good reviews, so we ordered up a copy and I set­tled down to test­ing it.

Unfor­tu­nately, I was less than impressed with Suit­case Fusion. I didn’t like the way that it looked. I found that it was really hard to actu­ally view the fonts. This becomes a real prob­lem when you have over 2,000 fonts. It’s an espe­cially big prob­lem for graphic design stu­dents who are just start­ing out and don’t yet know a lot about dif­fer­ent typefaces.

The biggest prob­lem that I had with Suit­case Fusion was it’s lack of options in regards to actu­ally man­ag­ing the fonts. All of a user’s fonts are stored in this location:

/Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Extensis/Suitcase/Suitcase Font Database.suitcasevault

This of course is a spe­cial format that can’t be read by any other pro­gram. Notice how the vault is stored in the user’s library? Okay, now put your­self in a com­puter lab envi­ron­ment with net­worked home fold­ers. The vault is stored in the user’s home folder which resides on our server. Every single user has their own vault, stored remotely. There is no option to recon­fig­ure this. In the past with Font Reserve, we were about to create a ‘font database’ that resided on each com­puter in the /Users/Shared/ folder. All of the fonts were local, and every user had access to them.

So unfor­tu­nately, this lack­ing fea­ture was a com­plete show stop­per for me. To be honest though, I really wasn’t very impressed anyway. I used the pro­gram on my own com­puter and it only took about a week before I started seeing web pages and HTML emails cov­ered in funny and unread­able char­ac­ters. After some research it turned out that the cul­prit was a double acti­va­tion of Hel­vetica. Deac­ti­vat­ing the extra copy solved the prob­lems. The thing was, I had been using Suit­case Fusion the whole time. One of the major rea­sons to use any font man­age­ment soft­ware is to pre­vent your com­puter from acti­vat­ing dupli­cate fonts!

Enter Font­Ex­plorer. She rushed in to save us all from the mis­er­able hell of the broken promises made by the font man­age­ment com­pa­nies. She was our knight in shin­ing armor…Well, okay, so not exactly. There is how­ever a lot to be excited about in Font­Ex­plorer X.

The user inter­face is very sleek and easy to use. It’s mod­eled after iTunes, so anyone who can figure that out can use Font­Ex­plorer. That’s most people I think. Font­Ex­plorer makes it really easy to view the fonts. This helps ease the prob­lems of decid­ing which ones you want to use in the first place. There is also a built in search func­tion what works really well. Con­sid­er­ing how smoothly the pro­gram runs and how easy it is to use, I thought it was the obvi­ous choice for our labs. Font Man­age­ment is an odd con­cept if you don’t know much about com­put­ers and fonts, so any­thing that makes it easier to see and under­stand is huge.

Since we started using Font­Ex­plorer in the labs, there have been good and bad things. On the good side, stu­dents seem to love it. They seem to find it much more intu­itive than Font Reserve ever was. They also like how easy it makes it to browse our fonts. This is impor­tant, because we have the entire Adobe Font Folio library which comes with over 2,200 typefaces.

On the bad side, I found out the hard way that you get what you pay for. First of all, Font­Ex­plorer doesn’t work with net­worked user accounts. At least it doesn’t right out of the box in the way one might expect it to. I devised a way to script around this, so even­tu­ally we did get it work­ing (More on that in the future).

There are also some really bad issues between Font­Ex­plorer and Quark 6.5. I wouldn’t say that this is exactly a Font­Ex­plorer issue per say. I think that it is some­where between Quark and Font­Ex­plorer, and prob­a­bly more Quark’s fault. Either way, it’s been really dif­fi­cult deal­ing with these prob­lems and trying to trou­bleshoot them. There just isn’t cur­rently any real solu­tions, beyond moving to Quark 7. That’s not an option for us right now.

So, a year later, I guess I’m still on the fence about whether or not moving to Font­Ex­plorer was the right deci­sion. It’s a really nice pro­gram that has some amaz­ing fea­tures. In some ways, Font­Ex­plorer is light years ahead of all of the other font man­age­ment soft­ware. This isn’t a small feat, since the other appli­ca­tions have been around for a long time and Font­Ex­plorer is still in its infancy. There are some reli­a­bil­ity issues to be con­cerned about, mostly with Quark. I really hope that Lino­type con­tin­ues to aggres­sively develop this appli­ca­tion. If they smooth out some of the kinks, it could be one of the best font man­age­ment appli­ca­tions on the market. As stands now, it’s a mixed bag.

1. Actu­ally it didn’t really work. You were sup­posed to be able to ‘temporarily’ acti­vate fonts, mean­ing they would auto­mat­i­cally deac­ti­vate when the user logged out. As it turned out, this fea­ture was broken. With our huge number of fonts, and more and more being acti­vated over time, we had all sorts of seem­ingly unre­lated prob­lems with the com­put­ers. For exam­ple: Microsoft Word would take sev­eral min­utes to open while it scanned all of the fonts. Even­tu­ally I solved this prob­lem by cre­at­ing a really ugly hack­ish script that essen­tially replaced the entire Font Reserve font data­base with a default one each time a user logged out. This effec­tively deac­ti­vated all of the fonts. Boy was it ugly though and there were also the inex­plic­a­bly long logout times… ↩