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Review: Font Reserve v3.1.1Reviewed By: Kirk Hiner Review Date: December 17, 2002
Fonts are a mess, and I hate them. I've worked on the design and prepress sides of the printing business, and I've hated fonts equally on both ends. Now, there was a time when I collected typefaces like I now collect little magnetic football helmets. My system was littered with them, and I had multiple programs to help me keep them in line: ATM Deluxe, Adobe Type Reunion, FontCat and more. I used to print off character sheets, categorize and bind them in a spiral notebook, and keep them readily available at my computer desk. Indeed, for a while, I even considered naming my children after various typefaces: Nueva, Skia, and New Century Schoolbook, Jr. But those days are gone. Now, typefaces are a burden. A necessary evil in the world of layout and design. They clutter my system, they're annoying to manage, they provide another element about which to worry when sending documents off to print or receiving documents to print, and too many people still think it's "modern" to print large blocks of text in sans serif typefaces. I haven't opened a MacAddict in about two years. This is why there has never been a shortage of font management programs. It's an odd genre to watch, because it's one in which no single company has ever gained a strong foothold. When I first started using them, Suitcase was at the head of the class. Before too long, the combination of ATM Deluxe and Adobe Type Reunion took charge. A couple years ago, though, I gave DiamondSoft's Font Reserve a try. I never looked back, and with v3.1.1, I still have no cause to do so. The reasons for this are varied, and I'll begin by praising DiamondSoft's diligence. They work closely with Apple to get their updates out quickly and bug-free. It doesn't always happen that way, of course, as anyone who works with Apple will attest, but Font Reserve has always proven powerful and reliable. Of course, this isn't news to Font Reserve users, or even Applelinks readers. Gary Coyne recently reviewed Font Reserve v3.0, but DiamondSoft explained to us that v3.1.1 was worth another look. They were right. Now, since Gary explained the purpose and discussed many of the strengths of Font Reserve, I'll leave them alone. Instead, let's look at his complaints about v3.0. First, v3.0 occasionally produced a start-up error, forcing users to manually start the software. This has been fixed. With v3.1.1, I haven't experienced one error yet. Also fixed are the communication problems between Mac OS X, Classic, and Mac OS 9. There are no more multiple copy warnings between systems, so you can be secure in the knowledge that Font Reserve will work no matter how you boot up. A major (and much welcome) improvement in v3.1.1 involved font compatibility. As promised, Font Reserve now supports Mac OS System fonts (dFonts), as well as OpenType, Windows TrueType, Multiple Master and double-byte fonts. That should please just about everyone, although I'll doubtless get e-mails from readers complaining that Font Reserve doesn't support some format with which they work. I'll suggest now that these e-mails be sent directly to DiamondSoft where they're more apt to do some good. Gary also mentioned that v3.1 would bring along plug-ins for Adobe Illustrator 10 and Adobe InDesign 2 to complement the Quark XPress plug-in offered in v3.0. They're here. These plug-ins take advantage of what DiamondSoft calls "Font Sense," a technology that automatically turns on fonts that are inactive in Font Reserve when the document is launched. I don't think I need to point out what a major time saver this can be. The news gets even better for OS X users. Font Reserve v3.1 and Mac OS X v10.2 (Jaguar) combine technologies to make system-wide automatic font activation a reality. That, my friends, is sweet. No need to bother with plug-ins at all.
Oh, and not to worry. Fonts that are required by the System cannot be touched, so there's no danger of accidentally shutting off the wrong fonts. If you try to activate a font but the same font is already active in the System Font Folder, Font Reserve won't allow it. You can still do it manually, but why would you want to? I also like that, to add fonts to Font Reserve, you need only drag a disk image onto the Font Reserve app. You can do this with your hard drive, Zip disks, CDs...pretty much anything that has fonts on it. Font Reserve will then automatically scan the drive or disk and either copy the fonts to the Font Reserve Database, move them there (if using compatible media), or copy aliases. It's your preference. I found it quite convenient to be able to move the fonts from my hard drive to make sure I had only one copy, but to copy them from a Zip disk so I could keep the disk as a back up. Now, it may be easy to get fonts into Font Reserve, but it's even easier to get them out. Let's say you set up a custom set for a specific client, filling it with each of the fonts used on the project. To collect these fonts for output, you need only drag the set folder from Font Reserve to the desktop. Font Reserve automatically copies the fonts to the desktop, so you don't need to dig deep into the database or worry about accidentally removing your only copies, and you don't run the risk of accidentally grabbing the wrong version of a font. I was also thrilled with the integration with MyFonts.com. By clicking the MyFonts logo, Font Reserve pulls up a dialog box that allows you to search for typefaces by name, foundry, style, and more. It then pulls up a list of possibilities, which you can preview directly in the dialog box. Font Reserve will show the various foundries that carry the typeface, including the price they're asking for it, and allow you to purchase the typeface right there (a MyFonts account is required, but it's free).
Now, there's plenty more here that Font Reserve can do, but I'd like to end on a couple requests of my own. Font Reserve provides many ways to preview and print catalogs of your font database, but I feel this could smoother. Command clicking a typeface will pull up a preview, but only one font at a time. I'd like for there to be a way to automatically show all fonts within a specific typeface, all typefaces within a specific class, and so on. It would also be handy to be able to print these previews.
Speaking of previews, I would like to be able to pull up specimen sheets that will show all fonts within a typeface on one sheet. For instance, if looking at Galliard, I would like to be able to print Galliard, Galliard Black, Galliard Black Italic, Galliard Bold, Galliard Bold Italic, etc., on one page, automatically. Now, having requested that, I'm sure someone will probably tell me that it can be done. If that's the case, it brings me to my next issue...no printed manual. There is a Quick Start Guide for Mac OS X, but it doesn't begin to cover the capabilities of Font Reserve (the Quick Start Guide for Mac OS 9 is only available as a PDF). It's frustrating, as I'm certain there are better ways of performing certain tasks, but I have no way of figuring out what they are aside from trial and error or poking through the PDF, which is often less productive than trial and error. I should also point out that, although Font Reserve doesn't handle specimen sheets exactly as I want, it does a better job with them and offers more options than any other font management program I've used. And finally, I'd be thrilled if Font Reserve offered a companion program that worked as Adobe Type Reunion did. I realize many programs now offer WYWISWYG type menus, but some very important ones don't (Photoshop being the main culprit). Also, Type Reunion automatically grouped type families into sub-menus for quicker navigation and allowed you to customize how fonts showed up in the menus. It was a fantastic program, and I lament the loss of it in OS X. Still, Font Reserve is a marvelous program that removes most of the problems of font management. In his review, Gary v3.0 a 5A rating in anticipation of what was to come in v3.1. Well we're now at v3.1.1, and I can say that Gary did the right thing. Font Reserve is solid, powerful, and feature-rich...and it may be enough to return me to my days of collecting typefaces. Those magnetic football helmets are getting hard to find, anyway, and they're a choking hazard to little Skia.
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Also sweet is the completely automated System Font Handler. See, although Mac OS X certainly made the handling of fonts a bit more intelligent, it made the placement of these fonts a nightmare. There are now five different places in which fonts can be placed: The System Font Folder, the Local Font Folder, the User Font Folder, the Classic Font Folder and, if you're connected to a network, the Network Font Folder. It's a mess, but Font Reserve is here to help. Although it can't manage the fonts in the System Font Folder, it can pull out the fonts that aren't necessary and place them in the Font Reserve Database along with all of the fonts in the other folders. This allows you turn off multiple versions of the same font, thereby preventing possible conflicts and print errors. For instance, through the installation of different programs, you may end up with PostScript, TrueType, Multiple Master and dFont versions of Helvetica, all active. Although the applications that installed it will require Helvetica, the version doesn't matter. So, you can shut them all off except for the PostScript version, for example, and everything will run just fine.
