FontAgent Pro 3 Doesn’t Suck
April 20th, 2005For a designer, font management is a necessary evil. It’s just not practical to have 5,000 fonts active in your System Folder. I know this, because I activated all 5,414 of my fonts when I first tried to use OS X’s built-in font manager – Font Book. It slowed my computer to such a crawl that I thought it had crashed, and it wouldn’t come back up when I restarted. I ended up restoring from last night’s backup. Lesson learned: OS X’s Font Book is not a professional level font manager. Maybe it is in 10.4, but it’s not in 10.3.
You may wonder why I was using Font Book in the first place. I gave Font Book a try because Suitcase X1 sucks so hard that I was driven into the arms of another font manager. Let me underscore that last point – Suitcase X1 is the most buggy, unstable application available on any platform. And that includes Flash MX (sans updates) which is really saying something.
Suitcase has some really great features, like being able to check fonts for corruption before adding them to the font library or activating them. Unfortunately, this fantastic feature is wildly ineffective, since adding or activating more than a few fonts with Suitcase typically invokes a crash. And some of the crashes aren’t run of the mill – some are stellar, resulting in a needed restart.
Which brings me to FontAgent Pro 3. It’s just like Suitcase, except without all that sucking. You import your fonts, it checks them for problems, it creates a nicely organized library of fonts. It has a 3-paned interface where you activate individual fonts or sets, and you can preview fonts using your own text. It has auto-activation for Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and Quark. You can print font books.
In short, FontAgent does everything Suitcase does except crash when you look at it funny. It even goes one better, because you can activate sharing between multiple macs running Font Agent, and skip the need for Suitcase Server.
Font Agent Pro is $99 and available in a 30-day demo.