Id say 'Suitcase' seems to be sort of standard nowadays..

I wouldn't go near Suitcase. I use Font Reserve and it's great. (They're owned by the same company, I think.)

Yea, 'Extensis' would be the parent company for both 'Suitcase' and 'Font Reserve'..
( I have to admit that I had no opportunity to try 'Font Reserve', yet.. )

It's only a matter of minutes before Stephen Coles chimes in in support of Font Agent Pro.

http://www.insidersoftware.com/

Auto�activation is important, no classic support, easy handling and browsing of many fonts, search function and repairfunction. And it should work nicely with InDesign CS.

I use suitcase on a PC (bleh) and it's kind of buggy. Usually it gets the job done, but don't spend too much time creating font lists and categorizing fonts in Suitcase as inevitably your list will get corrupt and you'll have to redo all the work over again. It's a common problem according to Extensis, I found after my first tech support call. So now I keep the fonts themselves in categorized folders and try to let the software do little more than turn fonts on and off.

I'm sure it works flawlessly on a Mac though.

How is Reserve superior to Suitcase?

MasterJuggler rules!

Tiffany, isn't it annoying having Suitcase always running as an application?

All of the font managers out there leave something running as an application (with FontReserve it's the "FontReserve Database", with FAP it's the "FontAgent Activator"). The main difference with Suitcase is that it's visibly running, and the browser and the activator are the same application. It's only really annoying when you, like a friend of mine, are unable to get Suitcase to quit when you shut down the machine or log out.

James, why do you like MasterJuggler? WAY back when it was my favorite font manager (we're talking 1990 here), and I was intrigued to see that it was brought back from the grave, but it's been frustratingly difficult to dig up information on it.

I use FontReserve at work. It's good. It very occasionally has problems with fonts that aren't 100%, but nothing that doesn't go away on restart.

I have to admit that Stephen's intense support for Font Agent has piqued my interest, since I don't use anything at home (bad idea, I know).

I have tried all of the font managers for OSX and decided MasterJuggler was it.

MJ works very much like the old ATM Deluxe. You activate and deactivate fonts from anywhere on your system. It does not copy or create a database, it just turns on and off fonts. You can create sets, you can browse the various Unicode ranges, and you don't have to keep it running in the background all the time.

There is no auto-activation, but I was told by Altsys theat that was something they were going to include in a future version.

Unfortunately they don't offer a downloadable trial version.

But they did have me listed as a registered user from back in the System 7 days, and they gave me the upgrade price.

I too am an MJ user - after a recomendation from James I should
add. For type designers on OSX it's the best as we're
constantly making multiple versions of the same font. I still
get a few caching problems but nothing like with FAP. For
graphic designers though, FAP is the best bet. My 2 �'s.

What about PC? what type of font management do you think is best for PC?

I want to put in a good word for Font Agent Pro. I'm a new voice on this list but over the last 15 years I have used a variety of font management tools.

I'm macBased and was quite content with Adobe's solution. I'd previously purchased and struggled through using Juggler and Suitcase.

When Adobe stopped supporting ATM I switched to Font Reserve. It worked fine but after Extensis purchased the software it apparently wasn't supported as it should have been. I had problems with it after upgrading my Mac operating system to Panther. Customer support was excellent but in the end they couldn't resolve the problem.

I switched to FontAgent Pro a couple of months ago and it's running well. I hope it continues to do so.

Eunice

�For type designers on OSX it's the best as we're
constantly making multiple versions of the same font. I still
get a few caching problems but nothing like with FAP

Really? this sounds like the business, I get sick of having silly names for updated font files to test. Have you tried the little app
"Font Cache Cleaner"? It does the trick for me, but forces a restart.

Kris

I have FontCache cleaner and still use it occasionally with Onyx
for various cache cleaning.

I should note that I've never been a fan of having more than
one typeface installed at a time so I realize I'm a bit of an
outsider on the font managment debate. I should logically
just throw the fonts I'm testing into the "fonts" folder on my
system but MJ makes it easy as you avoid some of the caching.
I say some because I'm not certain a.) how the much it caches
if at all and b.) how much Adobe apps are caching on their own.

Stephen wrote:
Do you need auto-activation?
Is Classic support important?
Do you want really good printed catalogs of your library?
Or are you just looking for something to turn fonts on and off?

I think that if your case is the latter, the best thing comes from manually managing them.
The most important thing is NOT to use Apple's Font Book, anyway.

If you consider FontAgent Pro, I recommend trying the free demo first. I tried it the other day; I spent the first half of my evening trying unsuccessfully to make it work properly, and the other half getting rid of it and make my system usable again.

Feature-wise, though, FAP does seem ideal. I might give MasterJuggler a try too, but I'm not sure if there's a demo available.