[Macworld]

Post your comments for FontExplorer X Pro 2.0 here

[pcharles]

What are the benefits of deactivating fonts? I have tried it with the Apple Font program and with the older free version of Font Explorer. It was fun, but I never saw any real benefit other than collecting fonts I rarely used.

[fribhey]

pcharles said:

What are the benefits of deactivating fonts?

i take it you're not a designer with thousands and thousands and thousands of fonts/typefaces....... if you aren't then you don't need fontexplorer and don't really need to worry about deactivating fonts.

[DVA_Airwolf]

The only benefit for us Pros (over the final v1.23 free version) is the addition of Photoshop CS3 / CS4 plug-ins.

[macnews]

I was very excited to see FontExplorer X Pro launch. While I have enjoyed the free version, I always thought if they charged a bit more and added some features it would be worth it. Sure enough, they did just that and put the client at a reasonable price - $79 USD.
As I manage a network of macs which are primarily used for everything from print design to web design, fonts are a HUGE issue. I have not been impressed since leaving OS9 with the server side management of fonts on the mac. It has been a glaring hole on the mac interface. With the server product I had hoped this would solve the problem. From what I can tell it will but at what cost?
I put in a sales inquiry for a 20 seat license of FontExplorerX Pro. The cost? $6000! Oh, yes, that is PER YEAR. Oh, I do get 4500 font bundle as well, of course how many of those do I really need or will be duplicate fonts I already have the PROPER license to use on all 20 seats?
I had thought the price might be around $300, heck even $1000. If it were a one time cost, I would gladly pay $2000 for 20 seats if it were a one time cost (400 more than the individual cost). Honestly, might even consider paying $6000 as a one time fee but not yearly. It just makes no sense.

[iestynx]

I was a long time user of Fontexplorer v1 and then when I upgraded to CS4 I had to make a choice between either shifting over to Suitcase Fusion 2 or upgrading Fontexplorer.
I decided to get Suitcase, but now I'm not too sure if I made the right decision, it won't auto activate fonts for Photoshop and sometimes when opening an InDesign document Indesign warns me of missing fonts that i know I have and i have to go and manually activate them in Suitcase. Maybe it's my set up after switching to Suitcase and having both trial versions running at the same time at one point.
Plus I don't think it has as many features as Fontexplorer, am I able to see the whole font set with Suitcase? I really need to dig deep into it to make sure I didn't make a mistake.
When OS 10.7 comes out I'm going to do a clean install and hopefully all will be well.

[alansky]

Suitcase Fusion 2 is, in my opinion, a "thanks for nothing" upgrade. A total case of "too little too late". FontExplorer X Pro definitely appears to be worth a look.

[pcharles]

No, I'm not a designer. I pretty much use a handful of font that work fine for chemistry, math, and classroom presentations via powerpoint. I was curious whether the applications run faster if the fonts you do not use are deactivated because I seem to remember that was the case with OS 9.

Incidentally, as a designer, how do you decide which of your many fonts should be used for a particular project? I assume this question requires a whole book to fully answer, but are there a few general guidelines? I look at serif and sanserif fonts and a lot of them are very similar to my untrained eye. I find I can use Arial and Helvetica interchangeably, or Times and Times New Roman. For a bit of fun I throw in Comic Sans or I might change the look of a quiz with Garamond, but that is about it.

Microsoft recently switched their default fonts in Office. Why is that?

Thanks,

Paul

[Edac2]

I too am a designer with thousands of fonts and have happily been using FontExplorer X (Free) for years. I tried the Pro version, and though I believe it's worth every penny of the $79 Linotype charges for it, I saw no real difference except the icons. In fact, I have been using FontExplorer less and less on a day-to-day basis, and the Finder more. One of the amazing new features of Leopard is that the Fonts folders recognize fonts that are in folders, even several layers deep. I keep an alias to my user font folder in my dock and manually drag copies of fonts I need into it from my master fonts folder, which is organized by foundry. This means one less program running in the background. I've also discovered that with Illustrator CS4 that it sometimes shows and lets me edit fonts that haven't been activated! Weird, inconsistent, but cool.

[lauriewigham]

I'm giving Font Explorer a trial and am mostly happy with it, but I really miss one feature from Suitcase Fusion: the ability to filter or sort by Class. I use this feature a lot on new design projects when I want to just look at a subset of my typefaces. For example, if I know I want some sort of script face for a new logo, I can set it up so I just scroll through all my script fonts. The other reason I like this feature is that I can easily print out font sample books, sorted by Class. This makes it much easier to compare printed samples of text fonts, or to rapidly scan all the symbols and dingbats I have, to discover something fun that I didn't know I have.
Is there any way to do this in Font Explorer?

[doctor sid]

I am a designer with 26,000+ fonts. I have tried Font Agent, Suitcase Fusion, the Free and PRO versions of Font Explorer. All 3 of the first apps work good but have slight lil things that happen every now and then. Most annoying was that my startup set wouldnt always be completely on every time I started up the computer. And the Font cache would get fouled up and Adobe programs wouldn't recognize fonts that were in fact activated. With FEX Pro, I am not having any of those issues so far. But overall they all 3 work fairly well....
I quit using Font Agent because the program for some reason would make Flash crash with certain fonts until I trashed the Font Cache. And it would forget what fonts were open sometimes when I restarted the next day.
I quit with Suitcase because it was notorious about not keeping fonts activated after restarts and needed a font cache cleaning quite regularly so that Adobe programs would recognize all activated fonts.
The FREE FEX program had the same bad problem of not remembering what fonts were activated a lot of times after a restart.
FEX Pro is the overall best performer, that is for a person that requites or just likes to have "thousands" of fonts to play with

[jaynelson]

Laurie: I just tried creating a "smart set" in FontExplorer X Pro, with the word "Script" chosen to be in any part of the font (Name, Description, Style, Family Name, or PostScript name) and 416 fonts were automatically added to that set for me. If there were others that it missed, I could add the word "Script" to the Comment area of the font, and it would then include that font in the Smart Set as well. Does this fulfill your desire for a "Class" option, as in Suitcase? In essence, you'd add the "Class" information to the "Comment" area of the font.

Printing the samples out would require the drag-to-desktop trick I mentioned in the review, then printing the file produced by dragging the samples out. Or, you could email the sample file to your client without first printing it.

[whitedog]

pcharles said:

What are the benefits of deactivating fonts? I have tried it with the Apple Font program and with the older free version of Font Explorer. It was fun, but I never saw any real benefit other than collecting fonts I rarely used.

There is still a performance advantage in OS X in having fewer active fonts. Every program that generates it's own font menu - Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Quark EXpress, Microsoft Word, etc., has to scan for active fonts when it starts up. Admittedly, these programs have improved performance since the days of OS 9 (and there is no longer a system imposed font limit). But it still takes time and resources to check for active fonts. The more active fonts you have, the longer it will take some applications and the system itself to launch. This has to be balanced against an individual's need to have a wide selection of fonts readily available. The "average" user requires little variety, so limiting active fonts is generally a good idea. At the same time, such users can get more than enough control over their fonts from OS X's Font Book. They have little need of a high-octane font management program like Font Explorer.

However, for graphic designers and print professionals, fonts are a vital resource - you can never have too many. Hence, the need for a robust program to help you manage them.

What I find interesting is how quickly Linotype's Font Explorer became a top program in the field. Extensis Suitcase has been around for more than a decade but, despite swallowing up it's major competitor, Font Reserve, a few years ago, has seen only modest improvement since the two were integrated into a single product, Suitcase Fusion. No doubt that's the natural state of a mature application, which Suitcase certainly is. Another veteran, FontAgent Pro, has it's fans, too.

Nevertheless, other excellent competitors have fallen by the wayside in the meantime, like the venerable Adobe Type Reunion (which never made the transition to OS X) and Master Juggler. So Linotype took a big gamble entering a market dominated by a single player, offering Font Explorer for free for over a year (the free version is still available, in fact). But as Adobe did with Photoshop Lightroom, the free beta program accelerated the development of market and mindshare for Font Explorer and has no doubt helped Linotype recoup their development costs.

Whether Font Explorer is superior to Extensis Suitcase Fusion (or FontAgent Pro) is debatable, of course, but it is $20 less expensive. I've never seen a side by side comparison of these apps (if someone knows of one, please let us know). Certainly Linotype built Font Explorer on a foundation pioneered by Extensis and other font utility developers. The two programs have a similar interface, which is designed around the standard model for OS X first seen in iTunes. Their feature sets are similar, too, though Font Explorer cannot create font specimen books.

One feature generally not available in these major font management tools, which is in my opinion a serious oversight, is the ability to preview fonts not yet installed on your system. Font Pilot can do that and more for you at a modest price. For about twice as much, so can FontVista. FontDoctor is great for inspecting and repairing fonts before or after you install them - it also has the ability to manage fonts, but I don't use it for that. If, like me, you've been collecting fonts for many years from myriad sources, FontDoctor is essential. Also by SoftDesign is FontXChange, which can convert TrueType, PostScript and OpenType fonts from one to the other, in both Mac and PC formats. This is a great tool for upgrading old legacy fonts so they can be used in professional printing environments that require PostScript or OpenType fonts.

Clearly, then, there is no one program that can do everything you might need to do with fonts. Nor, in my opinion, should there be. Such a program would be overkill for most people and would probably be priced out of reach as well. If you need a function not available in Font Explorer, Suitcase Fusion or FontAgent Pro, there are niche products available to cover the bases (of which I only mentioned the few I'm most familiar with). It would not be hard to invest $200 in a good collection of font utilities, but if fonts are important to you, that doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

[hmurchison]

Hmmmmm timely review. FEX Pro just so happens to be half off at MU Promo for the next 23 hours
http://www.mupromo.com/
I just may pick it up.