It’s about time we had an alternative
Published by on October 19th, 2005
For a good while now the only usable heavyweight font management tool on the Mac was Extensis Suitcase. Their captive market seems to have resulted in some complacency recently, particularly in the time taken to update Suitcase (and other Extensis applications) to compatibility with Adobe CS & CS2.
But now, there’s a new kid on the block. He’s mean, serious and free!
Unlike Apple’s attempt at appeasing graphics professionals with a half-hearted solution called FontBook (fine for a few dozen fonts, but watch it blow a fit over a few thousand), Linotype’s FontExplorer offers a genuine Mac-like interface and copes with thousands of fonts without a complaint.
I have around 2500 fonts on my system, which FontExplorer catalogued within a minute or two. The iTunes-esque interface makes font searching a breeze and there’s a direct link into the Linotype font store to browse and purchase new fonts directly - aha, there’s the reason it’s free!
Unlike Suitcase, you do not need to run the application continuously to have access to activated fonts. That means less overhead with all the other applications us creative types have to have open all the time, which of course means activated fonts are still there tomorrow until you deactivate. With its over sensitivity to font conflicts, Suitcase has a reputation for seriously messing with OSX’s system fonts to the point where some applications will not function correctly. Linotype’s offering created no such problems on the two systems here and was happy to handle whatever was previously installed. It also appeared to feel comfortable with a number of my older font files which consistently crashed Suitcase when trying to preview.
Let’s hope FontExplorer gains a strong foothold in this space to give Extensis a reason to shake up their act and produce a product - though it will have to automatically cook me dinner before I go back.
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One Response to “It’s about time we had an alternative”
It’s a lovely application. It greedily devoured more than double the number of fonts on my machine than what you threw at it and didn’t so much as utter a freeze, panic or subtle belch in protest. Thank you Linotype for a pretty solid and encouraging competitor to the Extensis headlock.