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- Provides: Font management and organization
- Format: Download or CD
- Developer: Insider Software
- Minimum Requirements: G3 PowerPC or Intel, Mac OS X v10.3
- Processor Compatibility: Universal
- Retail Price: $99.95
- Availability: Out now
- Version Reviewed: 4.0.1
While there are fantastic new features in version 4 of FontAgent Pro, a number of them will not function to their fullest if you do not perform a simple task that is pretty much hidden in the manual. New in version 4 is the ability to perform searches on fonts, see internal font attributes, and quickly locate all language fonts, bold fonts, and/or slanted fonts. However, you will not be able to make these new features function without my telling you "the trick!" Once you know "the trick," you will be jazzed with FontAgent Pro 4. Otherwise, it's not all that much different from version 3.
Note: A companion program to FontAgent Pro is Smasher. There is a review of Smasher version 1.6 and that can be read here.]
Font management programs have been around almost as long as the Mac has been around. In the early days, fonts were part of the system, and it was difficult to do anything with them. Then Apple introduced the Font/DA Mover, letting you finally having access to the fonts in your system and the ability to easily add new fonts. Nowadays, Apple provides Font Book, which makes it easy to add fonts into your system. But neither of these are font management programs. Over the years, there have been a number of font management programs, and FontAgent Pro has continued to be a solid, dependable program to control your fonts. Despite the fact that not all of my wishes from my review of FontAgent Pro version 3 were implemented in this release, this new version does continue Insider Software's tradition of great software.
To determine if you could use a Font Management program, there is a simple test to perform; go to one of your programs that has a Font menu and click on the font menu. If there is a long, long, long long list of fonts that you have to wade through to find the specific font you are looking for, than you are a good candidate to get a font management program. When you have that many fonts active in your system, it takes longer to load programs, longer to start your computer, and (needless to say) longer to find a specific font for your use, not to mention that such a load can cause system instability.
On a basic level, what font management programs do is provide the ability to turn off all of the fonts you do not use on a daily basis. The other basic function is to let you turn on fonts as needed for specific jobs as well as automatically turn those fonts on for you when you open a document that uses those fonts. Font Agent Pro does these operations, but it also performs a font check to make sure the fonts you install are viable. If they are not viable, you can delete and replace them.
When you first install Fontagent Pro, a "Setup Assistant" shows up that provides a simple wizard to guide you through some of the basics needed to get you started. The first thing it shows is a list of the features of FAPro. If you mouse over any of the icons, a quick description is provided.
Subsequent screens let you determine where FontAgent Pro will store your fonts. This is essential, because the best way to control your fonts is for FAPro to copy (or move, your choice) all of your fonts to a special, safe location. Technically, your fonts can be anywhere on your computer (or on a server and controlled by FontAgent Pro Server (not reviewed here)). When a font is activated, FontAgent Pro places that font in a shell within the operating system.
Also during the Setup Assistant process, FAPro looks throughout your computer (and attached drives) and finds copies of Adobe and Quark programs that require a special plugin for auto-activation of fonts. What's particularly good about FAPro's implementation of this is that each potential program is coupled with two buttons: one is called "Reveal" and lets you see where that program is located, and the other is "Install" for installing the plug-in. The reason why "Reveal" is so valuable is that, for example, I maintain two different partitions on my computer with different programs on each depending on what I'm testing and/or working with. The Setup Assistant located Adobe programs on the other partition, and if I didn't want to install the plug-in on those programs on that partition, I could easily see the issue and not install.
What the Setup Assistant does not do is guide you to "the trick!" More on that in a minute, but considering that so much of the new version is dependent upon the user performing "the trick," it is still boggling my mind that there is no mention of this important function in the Setup Assistant.
One of the first things I like to set up with a font management program is to manage the system fonts. Why? Well since I write essentially exclusively in English, I do not need non-English character fonts on a general rule, not to mention the various other fonts that are automatically placed in the many OS X Font folders by program that do not give you any choice. In FAPro, this is simply done by going to the Preferences and checking the first option: Manage System fonts. When you check this, there is a warning to turn off any open programs (if any of those programs have a link to a font that you might turn off, it could make the program unstable).
Once you have your System Fonts under control, you can import any other font you want into FAPro by clicking on the Import Fonts icon on the tool bar. Or, there's always my favorite, which is dragging the fonts, font folders, folders with fonts, whatever, into the left-hand side of the main FAPro window, seen two images below. When you import fonts, a Mac "sheet" roles down, displaying options for importing the new font(s), as seen below.
Now that you have fonts "in" FAPro, you can start to weed through the fonts to un-activate those you do not need. As you can see in the main FAPro window image below, some of the fonts on the bottom left show green dots (to the left) and others show gray dots. The green dots are those that are active and can be turned off (deactivated) by simply clicking on the green dots. You can also select multiple fonts by shift-clicking continuous fonts or Command-clicking discontinuous fonts. On the lower right, you can see what the characters of the selected font look like. I've just turned off Adobe's Sonata font, as my needs of typing out musical notes is not very high. However, I will not delete this font because I do not know if I might need to use some musical notes as decoration sometime in the future. This is specifically the value of font management programs; with a simple click on a gray button, I will have access to this font that otherwise I have no (general) need for. I can use it, and, once done, I can turn the font off until I need it again.
Much of the items in this window will be very similar to FontAgent Pro 3 users, but if they look in the lower right region of the image above, they will see a new tab: the Font Data tab. As seen below, the Font Data tab shows the font's classification and, well, blank data.
And here's the issue; there are a number of features in version 4 that depend on the user going to the Tools menu and selecting the second item "Update Font Profiles." That's it, that's "the trick." Much of the power of version 4 is dependant upon the user doing that, and you can only learn about it as a passing reference on the 47th and 53rd page of a 66 page manual. Talk about a buried treasure.
Once you've done this, new functionality and features start popping up all over the place. Below is a screenshot of the same font family but with their Slant, Properties, Weight, and Version number.
I'll get back to other aspects of the new features in a minute.
In the past, if you wanted to turn off the various language fonts that invariably get installed, you'd have to search for tale-tale names like "AppleMyungjo." It's a safe bet that this is a language font you may wish to deactivate.
But now, in version 4, there's a much easier way: the Font Classifier. Initiated by clicking on the red and yellow "A" in the toolbar along the top of the FontAgent Pro window seen above, you can browse by selected categories and styles. Below, you can see that I've selected "Art & Pi" for the Category and "Language" for the Style. Then, as fast as selected, there are all of my Language fonts I can turn off in one fell swoop by clicking on the blue dot above the green dots on the left hand side.
Not only can you find fonts by their classification, you can provide classifications and styles to fonts that for whatever reason do not have this information built into them (or the information was removed for some reason).
When you click on the second tab of the Font Classifier, all of the fonts you have that do not have classification show up. If you select a font and click on the "Sample Text" button on the bottom left, a sheet drops from the bottom (or top, depending on the windows placement on your screen) showing you the font's characters. At that point, you can select the Category and Style from the dropdown menus. The Style changes depending on the Category selected. Once you've established what you want, then you can click on the "Classify Selection" button on the bottom right. One glitch in the system is that now that these fonts are "classified," they should drop from sight from this view. Alas, all they seem to do is to drop to the bottom of the viewing window. If you click on the Browse or Review tab and then back to the Classify tab, they will be gone, as they have been classified. If you click on the Review tab, all of the fonts you've classified show up, letting you have a second chance of identification.
The one area where this falls down is because there is little information provided to guide the user on how to classify fonts. While there is a bit of running guidance in the window to the right of where the Category and Style dropdown menus are, that's it. They do a reasonable job of detailing the specific attributes of the various styles, and they still refer to an example font as a classic example of that Category and Style. This is done without providing a view of that font. It would have been more helpful if there had been an accompanying PDF showing these examples of the various Categories and related styles. Obviously if you are a font expert, you would not need such assistance, but for those who want to learn more about fonts, this is a sad omission.
Needless to say, the data you place here will let you see and find this data within the Classification listing in the main window and new Find feature. If you find a mistake, that, too, can be fixed. As seen below, if you find a font that is mis-classified, you can right (Control) click on the font and drag through the various sub-menus to set the corrected classification.
For years, the process of finding fonts often led to the user clicking methodically through hundreds or thousands of fonts. Even if looking specifically for Dingbat fonts, one still had to click through the serif, san-serif, script, and whatever other fonts were on the system. Now, it's better—much better.
Probably the biggest new feature in FontAgent Pro 4 is its ability to Find fonts. The find window is brought up by selecting Find from the File menu or using the (very generic) Command-f. Also note that unless you do "the trick" mentioned above, most of the search functionality becomes useless.
Seen below is the Find window. On the left, you can set the various font attributes you want to focus in on. For this example, I wanted to find all Adobe fonts that had a slant (italic), were Black (very wide), and were currently active. I quickly narrowed my list down to three fonts.
Now, notice the "Save" button in the image above on the lower right. I can click on that, give it a name and save it, and now it will show up in the main FAPro window as a set.
To give you a better idea of what range of attributes you can select from when trying to winnow down your fonts, see the image below. Note that the middle and right dropdown menus seen in the second image above do change appropriately for each selection. Using the Plus (+) and minus (-) symbols next to the attribute selection options in the Find window, you can add or subtract your selection as needed. [Please note: I found no mechanism for the FontAgent Pro user to add a "Comment" to a font.]
Ironically, with all of the work done in setting a font's classification, notice that you cannot search by classification. The lack of this functionality is a bizarre limitation.
Notice, however, that there are two tabs in the Find window. There is also a Keyword search. When this is selected, if you type in a font "type," FontAgent Pro will search your fonts and the internet. More specifically, it will search myfonts.com for fonts that also satisfy the keyword search. I'm not sure where the metadata for these keywords lies, because there are functioning keywords in the fonts on my system for cowboy, western, and other rather esoteric search directions.
If you click on the little folders to the left of the internet listed fonts, you are taken to the MyFonts website with that font selected. As stated, just about all of the features that were well done in version 3 are still around in version 4. If you haven't read my review of version 3, let me encourage you to do so now as I did not to rewrite the features that are not changed to save the space in this review.
There's no doubt that this is a major improvement for font management software despite Insider Software for crippling the user by not strongly mentioning the use of the "Update Font Profile" feature. That notwithstanding, I've told you, so you are set. What should be added in the Import selections is an option for automatically running the Update Font Profile function so every time you import a font(s), you also have the option to run this so that the newly imported font will not be invisible to Find searches.
I also find the interaction between the Font Classifier window, the Find window, and the main FontAgent window a bit frustrating. Since I cannot search on Classification window, I can turn fonts on or off but I can't create sets. In the Find window, I can turn things on and off and I can save sets, but I can't find things by classification. And, in the main FAPro window, I can either look at the font characters, or I can look at the font data. Perhaps to resolve this last issue, it would be good if the various panels in the main window were modular, letting you choose which panels you wanted to view at any given time.
There are other frustrations, such as how the manual shows what the "activated/deactivated" dot looks like when you've suppressed auto-activationm but provides no information on how to achieve that. This, coupled with a place for comments (you can even sort by comments), but no information on how to place a comment with a font.
Despite these lapses and confusions, FontAgent Pro works like a champ. It does what it's supposed to do, and it does it well. Hopefully, Insider Software will resolve my concerns in future versions.
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
Tags: Reviews ď Graphics/Design ď Utilities Reviews ď Writing/Publishing ď
