In my last post on Font­Ex­plorer, Tran­si­tion­ing to Font­Ex­plorer X, I alluded to some prob­lems I was having with it and Quark 6.5. I’d like to expound upon that a little bit.

In order to get on the same page, I want to define some stan­dard font man­age­ment ter­mi­nol­ogy first. I am talk­ing about using OS X in this post, but many of the more gen­eral con­cepts prob­a­bly apply to font man­age­ment on Win­dows machines as well.

System Font Fold­ers:

OS X comes with three default font fold­ers, each serv­ing a dif­fer­ent pur­pose:

/System/Library/Fonts/:

Con­tains all fonts nec­es­sary for the oper­at­ing system to run. Font stored here are acces­si­ble to all users on the system.

/Library/Fonts/:

Con­tains most fonts nec­es­sary for stan­dard appli­ca­tions to run. Font stored here are acces­si­ble to all users on the system.

/Users/<username>/Library/Fonts/:

Con­tains fonts only acces­si­ble to a single user.

Font Database:

This is the folder that your font man­age­ment appli­ca­tion stores your fonts in. This folder can be called any number of things, stored in any number of file for­mats, and in any number of loca­tions. It all depends on the par­tic­u­lar font man­age­ment appli­ca­tion and your setup. The impor­tant thing to remem­ber is that this folder is dis­tinct from all of the system font folders.

Auto-​Activation of Fonts:

This hap­pens when you open a doc­u­ment or appli­ca­tion and your font man­age­ment soft­ware inter­cepts a call for a font that is not cur­rently acti­vated. The font man­age­ment soft­ware then acti­vates the font for you. This can be done either through inter­cept­ing a system-​wide call for a font or via a plugin.

Manual Acti­va­tion of Fonts:

This is when you use your font man­age­ment soft­ware to acti­vate one or more fonts. After man­u­ally acti­vat­ing a font, it will be avail­able to all appli­ca­tions on the system until the font is deactivated.

Auto-​Activation Plug-​In

A Plug-​In that auto-​activates fonts that are requested by an appli­ca­tion. These plu­g­ins are writ­ten for a spe­cific appli­ca­tion (usu­ally ones like Quark and InDesign).

Cur­rently I am using Font­Ex­plorer 1.1.2 and Quark 6.5.2. I have also tested these prob­lems using Quark 6, Quark 6.1, and Quark 6.5 and gotten the same results.

In the first ver­sions of Font­Ex­plorer there seemed to be some spo­radic prob­lems with the auto-​activation plugin for Quark 6.5. Some­times it would work fine, but other times the font either wouldn’t acti­vate at all, or only parts of the type­face would acti­vate. Often times there were prob­lems with the italic ver­sions of type­faces. For what­ever reason I also seemed to have a par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult time with Univers 39. Since I’ve installed Font­Ex­plorer 1.1 (and up), which includes ver­sion 1.24 of the Quark 6.5 plugin, things seemed to be going very well with auto-​activation. In fact, I haven’t noticed any prob­lems with auto-​activation in Quark 6.5 using Font­Ex­plorer X 1.1 and up.

The real prob­lems between Font­Ex­plorer and Quark seem to happen when fonts are man­u­ally acti­vated. A normal work­flow for cre­at­ing a Quark doc­u­ment should go some­thing like this:

1. Open Font Man­age­ment application
2. Acti­vate desired fonts
3. Open Quark
4. Create a new document

All of the fonts that you acti­vated should be avail­able in Quark’s font menu at this point. In an ideal world, you should also be able to acti­vate and use addi­tional fonts with­out having to quit Quark. Clearly though, this is not an ideal world.

Unfor­tu­nately, in this case, after fol­low­ing the steps listed above, many¹ of the fonts simply do not show up in the Quark font menu. There is no log­i­cal reason for this that I can figure out. The prob­lem is repro­ducible. I’ve iso­lated two fonts that always have this prob­lem: Duc De Berry LT Std and Serlio LT Std (both Open­Type). Also, no amount of quit­ting Quark, deac­ti­vat­ing and then reac­ti­vat­ing the fonts or clean­ing the font caches will work. The fonts simply will not show up in Quark.

Curi­ously, if you take one of these prob­lem­atic fonts and copy it to any of the system font fold­ers (may require a restart), the font appears in Quark with­out a prob­lem. Great, but this doesn’t help us, since we’re cir­cum­vent­ing the whole ‘font management’ thing entirely by doing this. Remem­ber, the whole reason why we’re using font man­age­ment soft­ware is because we have lots of fonts, too many to leave acti­vated all of the time.

I strug­gled with this prob­lem for quite some time look­ing for pos­si­ble solu­tions or workarounds. I even tried pulling out my hair, but that didn’t seem to work either. Search­ing for the prob­lem yielded only a couple of results. Over on the Font­Ex­plorer dis­cus­sion board, there were a couple of posts with sim­i­lar prob­lems (no solutions):

• QuarkX­press 6.52 Does Not See Acti­vated Fonts
• Prob­lems with (How I hate) Quark 6.1

On Cre­ative Guy, there are some inter­est­ing tips for fonts in Quark. They sounded promis­ing, but didn’t fix this par­tic­u­lar problem:

• More Quark font issue fixes
• Miss­ing fonts in the Quark XPress font menu

Finally I found this post on Jason Santa Maria. The post itself isn’t that inter­est­ing, the com­ments are where it gets good.

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… ↩

Fonts have got to be the bane of my exis­tence. I manage an all-​mac com­puter lab for a col­lege. We have a graphic design pro­gram in the depart­ment, so we run Quark, InDe­sign and Font Explorer X. We also own the Adobe Font Folio (open type edi­tion) Library.

Since we got this type library, I’ve had noth­ing but prob­lems in our labs. We used to run Font Reserve, but I got fed up with having to script around the fact that it was never deac­ti­vat­ing fonts like it was sup­posed to. With a 1000+ font library and lots of users, that’s a prob­lem. Try having a PR major wait two min­utes for Word to open, and then bitch you out for it.

I like Font Explorer X a lot, but installing it in our labs hasn’t come with­out it’s fair share of prob­lems. The biggest thing right now though is that Quark 6.5 just refuses to play nice with any of the other soft­ware. Sup­pos­edly 7 is better, but since they released it a month after our bud­get­ing cycle ended, we’re stuck with 6.5 at least until next summer.

Latest Prob­lem: All of those True Type fonts that come preintstalled with Tiger (and Office) I can’t get rid of. They are all always acti­vated, except that Quark appar­ently doesn’t like the Italic ver­sions. This is a real prob­lem because the stu­dents get con­fused and don’t real­ize that the true type is not the open type. They don’t see an italic listed in Quark so most just assume it doesn’t exist until their graphic design pro­fes­sor yells at them. Yuck.

I need the font insan­ity to stop. Now.