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One of the features that made the Mac special was its ability to have a variety of fonts. Amusingly, the original Macintosh designers had no idea about the number of fonts that would be created. Originally, it was VERY difficult to get fonts in and out of the Mac, but things were simplified with the Font/DA Mover. (If you don't know what the Font/DA Mover was, be grateful). Around the same time, the programs "Font Juggler," and "Suitcase" were written which allowed you to open and close fonts on the fly and to have significantly more fonts open on your system than would otherwise be possible.

Now that we no longer use the Font/DA Mover, the new Font Folder is much easier to use, but still can be a pain in the neck. Currently if you want to decrease the number of fonts in your system, you have to quit every program you may be running. This is very unMaclike. Having some font utility program is necessary if only to get past this limitation.

In fact, if all one needs to do is to occasionally open and close a few extra fonts that one has on their computer, then either Font Juggler or Suitcase is probably satisfactory. But, if you want to manage your fonts, then Font Reserve is probably as important as the programs that use your fonts.

Font reserve is not an extension, but rather an application. More specifically, it is a database specifically designed for fonts. You interact with Font Reserve via the Font Reserve Browser (seen in the first graphic). Herein one finds an upper window of font "sets" and a lower window of all the fonts in your database.

Initially, the only "Set" you will have is the one called System Fonts which contains all the fonts in your System's Font folder. While fonts can be turned on or off in the lower window, one of the powers of Font Reserve is to drag the font to the upper window into a set. To move a font into a set, one creates a folder in the upper window and simply drags the desired font(s) from the lower window to the new set (folder). You can have the same font in as many sets as you need, and you are never limited by simply having fonts "on" or "off."

The advantages to this are obvious once you think about it. Let's say you have a twice annual newsletter that uses seven separate fonts. You create a set of those seven fonts and twice a year you can turn all those fonts on with a single click and export exactly the fonts you are using to others creating the newsletter (not the fonts, just the information about the fonts used in the newsletter). By dragging the set to your desktop, you can easily provide to your service bureau all the fonts necessary for your newsletter; and finally, with a simple click you can turn off those fonts till they are needed again in six months.

In the lower window shown in the Font Reserve Browser is the database of all your fonts. Note that you can look at fonts alphabetically, and in addition, by using Font Reserve's Filtering (known as a "find" in most other databases), you can decrease the number of fonts you would otherwise have to look through. Like the find capability in the Finder, one can make as many levels of a search as one wishes. For example, one can search for all TrueType Scripted fonts and exclude those from Microsoft. Thus, a search through 30 scripted fonts instead of looking through more than 600 fonts for just the one you want can make a potentially long search quite reasonable.

"But what does the font look like?" Being able to sort, resort, find and select

doesn't mean all that much if you can't conveniently see a sample of what you are looking at. Font Reserve has always had a nifty trick for showing you a font's appearance. This is done by bringing the cursor of the mouse up to the font icon in the font browser window and holding the control key down as you mouse down. There, in size 72 font, is the name of the font in the font's own characters.

But, these are all features of Font Reserve that have been around for most of the program's life. Specifically new in 2.5 is probably one of the most asked for features since version 1 and that is Font Sense™ Technology. What Font Sense™ does is automatically open fonts that are not currently open if such a font is used in a document that you are opening. For example, you create a document using (say) the Abaddon font (shown above) on a document. And let's say that you set that font for Temporary usage (which means when you restart the computer the font will be off). And let's say that suddenly you have a need to open that document a week later. Font Reserve will sense what font(s) you have used in that document and automatically turn them on ready for your use.

Also in 2.5 is WYSIWYG Menus by Action Utilities. Rather than reinventing the wheel, Diamond Soft felt it was more productive to bundle WYSIWYG Menus with Font Reserve. This is the full version of WYSIWYG Menus and not a scaled down version. I'm not reviewing this product here as this is a review of Font Reserve, but trust me, WYSIWYG Menus is as good as all the other products from Action Utilities.

FR is System 9 ready, but here it's more of a case where System 9 is Font Reserve ready. In previous (recent) systems, one could only have 128 open font suitcases. With System 9, this has been expanded to 512. If you need it all, Font Reserve can use it all.

Additionally, FR has now expanded AppleScriptability, runs faster, and Font Reserve has improved sample book printing. This last one is particularly nice. There are a variety of programs available to print out sample books of your fonts, but all of them require the fonts to be currently active. This is unnecessary with FR--all one has to do is to click once on any font (in the lower Font Reserve window) you wish to have included in a sample printing, and select which printing template to use. The fonts do not have to be installed into the system. There are a variety of templates to choose from, such as one that allows you to fill one page with one font type with all characters at a variety of sizes, to those that print up to 20 font samples on one page. The sample sheet I particularly like is one which lets you print out 12 fonts per page but also displays every character of each font (albeit at one size).

This is another one of those programs for which (at least) thumbing through the manual is a VERY good idea. For one thing, some of the features do not make any sense unless you inadvertently and/or accidentally do the correct thing. As mentioned above, to print out font sample pages, one first needs to select the fonts you wish to print and then select which Specimen Template you wish to use. Perhaps because I'm not in the publishing business, the term "Specimen Template" doesn't necessarily mean anything to me. So the menu called Specimen didn't mean much to me. Additionally, if you don't have a font selected, all the possible Specimen Templates are greyed out. So here is something that I didn't know what it was, and it was greyed out! It would have been nice for there to have been some mechanism for the program to say "Please select a font before selecting a template."

Likewise, you can only Export font sets. That is, you select a set, click on the Export Button, and all the fonts in that set are itemized so if someone Imports that information, they have the same set with all the fonts already selected and ready to go. Sets are in the top half of the Font Reserve Browser window. Fonts are in the lower half. If you select a font or two and then try to export that information and place it in a folder, you can watch a folder turn into a nonfunctional generic document icon. I don't know whether this is a feature, a bug, or just a stupid user error, but either way, this demonstrates another example of this program not being idiot proof. (And I'm the idiot to test it!)

If you have 20 fonts, you do not need this program. If you have 100 fonts you can get by with one of the other font assisting programs. However, if you have more than one hundred or so fonts, and/or you wish to have total control of your fonts regardless of how many you have, than this program is vital. If you already have a previous version, this new version 2.5, with Font Sense™ Technology and WYSIWYG Menus, is worth the upgrade. Meanwhile, you can go to their website and download a demo copy of the program that can work with up to 100 fonts.
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