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Provides: Font management and font repair
Developer: Extensis
Requirements: Mac OS X v10.5.8 or greater (including v10.8.1), Intel processor (1.6 GHz or faster, 300 MB HD space (1 GB of HD space for online font service)
Premium Retail Price: $99.95 for new, $49.95 for upgrade
Extensis released this new version of its font management program, Suitcase Fusion, some time ago, but I chose to hold off on releasing my review until all aspects of the application were up and running. Sadly for Extensis, a big part of this wait was for Adobe to make some bug repairs to Photoshop so that it (PS), Illustrator and InDesign could take advantage of an interesting new feature in Suitcase 4. If you do a lot of font experimentation during the creative stage of your design work, the wait was worth it (but with caveats, as you will read). Besides the standard ability to create font sets for projects or font types, Extensis has added both WebINK fonts and Google Fonts for integrating fonts into your website design. (Goodbye Verdana in my websites!) Also provided with Suitcase Fusion 4 is the latest edition of FontDoctor to keep your fonts healthy. Unfortunately, a number of the features in Suitcase have limitations that may make you stroke your chin and wonder "if only..." Much of Suitcase is good but it is not perfect.
My first Mac, the Fat Mac (if you will), had I believe 12 font families. Not much later I must have had about 100. Now I have thousands, literally. Fonts begot fonts begot fonts. It's amazing how one can look at a typeface and go "close, but that's not what I want my page to say, let me see what else I can find..."
At a certain point in collecting fonts, you begin to realize that if you have every font you own installed, your system runs slower and slower until it moves along almost dead as it takes longer for font menus to display, and finding the desired font can take longer than paint to dry. Because of this, if you have a lot of fonts, or like to have your fonts organized, a font management program like Suitcase can be anything from handy to vital.
Suitcase Fusion 4
[Because this is mostly a review of Suitcase, I'm leading my review with Suitcase before I get to FontDoctor. Nonetheless, for the best workflow, use FontDoctor before you use Suitcase (at least for the first time).]
When you first open Suitcase, you are presented with (at least) your system fonts already displaying. With FontDoctor, you'll have a chance to create a new folder of all of the fonts in your computer into one single folder. By dragging this newly created font folder onto the window, your fonts will be "installed" into Suitcase. Alternatively you can create a "New Library" and then "Add Fonts to Library" (both from the File menu).
[Note: As you will read, your use of Suitcase will work more efficiently if you remove as many fonts as you can from your System Font folder with the exception of essential fonts. Extensis does provide a PDF that instructs how best to safely do this and it can be downloaded here. Unfortunately there is no automatic way to do this by Suitcase.]
The Suitcase window is divided up into four main sections:
- The top left-hand panel to see your Libraries and Sets of fonts. Unfortunately there is no collective view of all your fonts. Be aware that if you have selected either of your main collections of your fonts (your main Font Folder or the System Folder) you can search through only the contained fonts of each group but no cross searching can be done.
- The bottom left-hand panel where you can set a font's attributes: Classifications, Foundry, Keywords, and Style. Depending on which attribute you are looking at, sometimes the check-boxes act like radio buttons, other times they act like check-boxes. Regardless, setting these dynamics will substantially help you when you are trying to find a given font or a given type of font.
- The bottom right-hand where you can see the listings of all the font families and fonts in a selected set or folder. Each font family will be displayed as a folder and if you click on the triangle next to the folder, all of the fonts in that family are displayed.
- The top right-hand where you can see what the font actually looks like. If you click on a specific font family in the font listings below this section, you will see all of the fonts in that family. If you click on a specific font, only that one font will be displayed. The type of display depends on what you've selected: shown below is the ABC123. You can also chose the Waterfall, Quicktype (a sentence of your choosing) or a paragraph of text (of your choosing).
One last viewing option is a new one called "Web Preview." This is a bit more complicated to set up as it requires you to have your WebLink Name and Password (no cost), and then upload a page of text to a URL and then you can test various fonts "on the page" that you want to work with. It's a bit awkward at first but it does work and most importantly, it does work well.
You can create specific sets of fonts such as those for a specific project. Additionally, you can create a Smart Set where the criteria is established by a filtering mechanism such as fonts from a particular foundry or a specific type of font (e.g., Open Type). Whenever you are in the process of creating a Smart Set, a filtering mechanism opens up on the top of the upper right region that lets you define the Smart Sets' criteria. Thus, when using a Smart Set of Open Type fonts, if you add more Open Type fonts to your collection after creating this set, the new Open Type fonts are automatically added to the Open Type Set.
You can also create Smart Sets using the Attributes region: you can create groups of types of fonts such as Serif, script, or Oldstyle amongst many others. Curiously, the check-boxes displayed in the Attributes region act like radio buttons. Why they do not display as radio buttons is unknown. Most of the fonts seem to already have some attribute already attached to them, but not always correctly. Thus, if you go and create Smart Sets for each of the attributes (why are these not already created by Extensis), you should go through each Set and each font to verify what's what. Unfortunately what you can't do is to find all the fonts that do not have any attributes set (e.g., show me all fonts that do not have Classification). If you could find the fonts that have no previously set attribute, than it would be easier to work with just that set to provide to them their unique attribute.
What is very frustrating is that any fonts you have in the System Fonts folder are maintained separately from those stored in your personal Font Folder. Thus, fonts in your System Font folder will be excluded from your Sets and Smart Sets. If you try to apply an attribute to a System Font folder, you'll be given a warning letting you know you can't do that. As such, as mentioned early on, it's wise to empty as many safe fonts as you can from your System Font folder into your personal font folder.
Meanwhile, on the far right side of each font displayed (in the upper right-hand region of the Suitcase window) are three very small icons (why do engineers always seem to be young with great eyes). Nonetheless, these are rather handy:
The Star sets that font as a Favorite. You can go through a whole collection of fonts, select those that might work for a given project as Favorites, then do a Find on all Favorites, do a final "keep & toss," put them in a set and you are done. What doesn't work here is that there is no global "un-favorite" to return all back to original condition. Thus, once done, you have to manually un-favorite any fonts you tagged one-by-one.
The 2nd icon lets you drag a .png image of that set to the desktop ostensibly to send a collection to your client to make final decisions on selected fonts. This .png is created on the fly by Suitcase as you drag out the icon. It's very slick.
Lastly, the 3rd icon lets you have a floating window of that font off to the side so you can examine other fonts while still maintaining selected fonts in front of you. These floating windows do continue to have the Favorite star showing, but the name of the font is only visible when the mouse is hovering over the floating window. I have to say that the first and third options in this set of tools has made finding the best font out of the fonts I have on my system about as good as it gets. What would/could make it even better is some mechanism to un-favorite all of the selected favorite fonts.
As stated you can perform a Find of your fonts. Shown below on the left are a collection of possible conditions you could search for and on the right is a sampling of what you can narrow down your search (for example) when you've selected the "Classification" option on the left. Each of the criteria on the left may have their own unique criteria on the right. In addition, you can create multiple levels of a search such as "All Postscript fonts who's name includes Times and is not Bold."
But perhaps the most exciting yet equally frustrating new feature, and the one that I've been waiting way too long for, are the new Panels that show up in the Design Suites applications from Adobe: Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. From within these three applications one can go into the Windows menu and pull out the Extensis Panel. As shown below, you can access all of your fonts from within these applications. You can see them in their actual font glory and turn them on without having to open Suitcase.
Although rather convoluted, one can access any saved sets or entire libraries.[To do this you need to first click on the "+" icon seen above to the right of the drop-down menu "Suitcase Fusion fonts" and select a previously made set. At this point you need to rename the name field in this Panel or you get a default name. Surprisingly, each default name is the same, they do not add a #2, #3 or any other marking to let you know what's what. It's also rather strange that you have to rename this collection that you've already collected and named in Suitcase, nor can you simply open these previously created sets. Very strange.] As you work through the fonts, you can turn them on, or at least you think/hope you are. Curiously enough, there is no feedback to your activities in this Panel. There is no check-box or changing colored button, underlined text, or any other feedback that you've selected a given font and it is now activated (beyond it now showing up in the Fonts menu). In addition, there is no apparent way to turn off (deactivate) a given font once it has been turned on in the Panel from the Panel. And lastly, when you go back to the Suitcase application, there's no feedback that any font that was turned on from the Panel has in fact been turned on. That is, you can select a font that you know has been turned on and look at the font from within Suitcase and not see any indication that it has been turned on.
I have no idea if my complaints have any chance of correction as their may not be a mechanism to accomplish these issues. Regardless, if they can be fixed, they should be and if they can't be fixed, someone needs to figure out how to make it work in the first place or at least let you know of these limitations. Unfortunately as cool as this could be, there are so many limitations and shortcomings to this feature as to make it frustrating to use, but one that you still may wish to use.
Things that are still there include auto-activation of fonts for Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, InCopy, Photoshop and QuarkXPress
Before I leave Suitcase, let me also add that I occasionally found it slow to populate font views in the upper right region. Yes I have a lot of fonts, but when I've done some selection so I only have two or three fonts selected in this region, I would occasionally get some spinning, but not all the time.
FontDoctor
Some of the worst problems that one can have with software can be caused by problem with your fonts, not the software itself. The reason why this is so heinous is that you are busy futzing with your application when the problem has nothing to do with the errant application at all. What causes fonts to go bad is beyond me but it happens. And when it happens, tracking down the problem can be a long, laborious, process unless you simply check your fonts to make sure they are all healthy. FontDoctor can do that.
When you first start FontDoctor, the first thing you want to do is to open up the Preferences and turn off the Interface sounds. [I do not know which engineer thinks that every time you click on something FD should make a noise, but if I ever meet him, I want to give him a dope slap.]
One of the Brilliant things that FontDoctor can do is to peruse a collection of font folders and create one font folder of your fonts to rule them all. This can be done as a "move" or as a "copy." The latter is best as it leaves your original fonts in their original folders (which you can archive onto CDs, other hard drives, whatever). For organizational reasons, you really want to do this. If you move your fonts, any anything happens to them, you can't go back to your original folders because, well, your originals became corrupted because you moved, not copied your fonts.
Once you're ready to start, if you click on "Options" in the upper left hand corner, you can see the various options for the font testing about to start.
When you click the "Diagnose Fonts" button, FD will ask if you want to check the system fonts or any other folder containing fonts on your HD. Then you just let it run to get a report like the following:
The "Organize" tab you see above lets you search your HD (and external HD) to look for fonts and add (copy or move) them to a single folder. The Tools tab lets you clean your font caches, move fonts within a font file, and compare fonts. This means that if you have the same font from different foundries, different years, or different types of fonts (Postscript, Opentype, etc.), here you can compare them. Be warned though because it can be a tedious process but it does beat having multiple copies of the same font on your system and it especially beats having to do this completely manually.
The interface for this is cumbersome, especially if you've had FontDoctor organize your fonts into sections and subsections in alphabetical order. Once FontDoctor has created this new ordered structure, you need to click on the left side, weave yourself through your Open command all the way to where the font in question is, and then do it again for the right side. Below you see where I selected Helvetica and HelveticaCYPlain to see what it had to offer. When I first received this new release of FontDoctor there was a text-wrapping issue where lines that were too long wrapped in a space where there was room for only one line cutting off the bottom of the wrapped line of text. Now, in this updated release, there is no wrapping and the text trails off to the break between the two fonts being examined with no way to scroll to the left or right. Since this is version 8.2 of FontDoctor, I'm not only surprised to see this, but in an updated release as this I'm very surprised to see this.
One thing I'd really like to see here is that since both FontDoctor and Suitcase come from the same company, why not have the ability to right-click in Suitcase so that you could select: "Compare in FontDoctor left side" and "Compare in FontDoctor right side." Some interaction between these two programs in this regard is long overdue.
Once you are satisfied that your fonts are in good shape, in a good place, organized, and you are using the families you want to work with, it's time to open Suitcase Fusion 4 and work with your fonts!
In short...
In short Suitcase Fusion 4 is a muddle, both good and bad. It's filled with great features that were never completed great. I love the ability to set fonts as favorites during the find process, I like how I can pull out font image sets. The find capabilities are wonderful. There's nothing wrong with Suitcase Fusion 4, but lots that just doesn't work well. There are many cross-interactive elements that just do not exist creating extra work for the user. However, it never crashed on me and it has let me manage my fonts quite well (despite the limitations of working around the System Fonts/My Font Folder issue) and I've found that accessing fonts from within Adobe applications has strong benefits (despite the limitations).
FontDoctor is an important app if there ever was one. Its ability to weed through all of your fonts, make sure the paired fonts have pairs, look for problems (fix them if possible) and organize the fonts into a single folder for use by Suitcase is essential. But to use the Compare fonts feature is dreadfully awkward. Since FontDoctor itself (in creating the single folder storage location), you'd think Extensis would create some mechanism to help you find/locate the fonts you wish to compare the fonts. You'd think that by this time there would be some cross-interaction between Suitcase and FontDoctor but alas no.
There's a lot there in these applications, just that there's a lot missing as well.
Applelinks Rating
___________ 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.
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