Cool Mac Gear

At Macworld Expo last week, DiamondSoft Inc. announced an update to Font Reserve Single User, targeted to expediting the workflow in Mac OS X publishing environments. Version 3.1 incorporates DiamondSoft’s superior and innovative Font Sense technology to provide accurate auto-activation of fonts to popular Mac OS X publishing programs.

To ensure that users can manage all their fonts with Font Reserve, version 3.1 adds crucial support for OpenType, the joint Adobe and Microsoft cross-platform font standard. The update, slated to ship in August 2002, also adds support for Windows TrueType, double-byte, and dFont fonts.

"OpenType and Mac OS X are the future of publishing," says Brian Berson, president and founder of DiamondSoft. "The OpenType standard solves many problems inherent to old font formats, including the confusion of multiple files. What you have with OpenType is a single, cross-platform file capable of containing more than 65,000 characters that display beautifully at any resolution. What else could you want?"

For a seamless publishing workflow, Font Reserve 3.1 provides plug-ins to automatically activate fonts for documents opened in Adobe InDesign 2 and Adobe Illustrator 10, both Mac OS X–native applications. In addition, this update provides an updated autoactivation XTension for QuarkXPress 5. Font Reserve’s auto-activation XTension and plugins take advantage of DiamondSoft’s proprietary Font Sense technology, which is designed to provide absolute font identification.

With support for all popular font formats, Font Reserve 3.1 is designed to manage all the fonts on a workstation. To that end, Font Reserve is the only font manger to provide a System Font Handler. In version 3.1, users now have a completely automated method for moving nonessential fonts out of Mac OS X’s many System Fonts folders and into Font Reserve. By managing all their fonts with Font Reserve, users know exactly what fonts they have and which ones are active at all times.

DiamondSoft Inc. also announced a Mac OS X client for Font Reserve Server, the first and only true client-server font management system. Font Reserve Server is designed to solve the challenges of managing fonts for Macintosh workgroups. The client software—the Font Reserve Server Browser—will continue to be available for Mac OS 9 in addition to Mac OS X version.

The Mac OS X client, slated to ship in the third quarter of 2002, is free to current Font Reserve Server users. The Font Reserve Server software for version 1.5, which debuted its Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server support this spring, will continue to be available for Windows NT and Windows 2000 workstations and servers as well.

"Mac OS X is the future of publishing," said Brian Berson, president and founder of DiamondSoft. "Our new client software takes advantage of the platform's speed and stability, providing workgroups with quick, reliable font management. With the server running on Mac OS X as well, we’re now able to offer publishers a solid, single-platform solution."

For more information Font Reserve Server and Single User, visit www.fontreserve.com. Also be sure to check out the Gary Coyne's review of Font Reserve v3 here at Applelinks.

Cool Mac Gear