I installed Panther yesterday and its really stable and its cool. Font book could be cool, but I'm sticking with Font Reserve for the time being. I read an article that was down on font book. I'll wait and see.

My mistake - there's nothing wrong with Helvetica - I just disabled it from the FB accidentally and therefore the webpages rendered all wrong. If you have the basic X fonts (Geneva, Helvetica, Lucida Grande etc) enabled, everything works just fine!

>So, halfway through writing this I just discovered that
>Suitcase 10.1.3 "unexpectedly quits" whenever I launch it.
>Ouch. I've gotta sleuth that one out and get back to you.)

Maybe an upgrade to Suitcase X1 would alleviate those pains. My only recommendation if you update Suitcase is to let their installer do all the talking. I thought I would be helpful and manually delete a bunch of Suitcase support files in Classic, and X1 crashed continuously after updating. A clean install of X1 over a fresh install of 10.1.x worked.

Stephen, you may be right about Apple not wanting to obliterate the other font-management apps, but it didn't hesitate to push ATM Deluxe out the door, and surely Adobe had the greatest market share (or maybe they were neck-and-neck with Extensis) in that area before OS X.

Apple also hasn't had any qualms about challenging Microsoft in the browser and presentation-software arenas (arenae?). I love Apple software, use Safari almost exclusively and am glad for the appearance of Keynote, but I wonder whether it's a wise strategy in the end.

Mark, that's what I thought, too -- until I heard directly from an Adobian that FontBook was the specific reason Adobe stopped developing ATMD. He said, "We couldn't say it publicly before the release of Panther."

Well, I'd hate to contradict one of my colleagues in public.

However, a look at the relevant timelines makes it pretty clear the two are unrelated; or if anything the causation is the other way around. AFAIK, FontBook was never envisioned until after OS X had been out on the market for a while, and people were complaining about OS X's font handling.

Regards,

T

ATM Deluxe was never that great. From what I remember, you had to double click to view a font, which it then brought up in a new window. So to compare 3 fonts, you would have 4 windows open. It did, however, always auto-activate without problem. The current Suitcase is better than ATMD ever was.

Somewhat related: If you Illustrator 10/OS X users uncheck all of the options when saving native files, Suitcase will not auto-activate the fonts in that file the next time you open it. I figured this out after almost a year. Extensis still may have no clue.

Hi,
I am a little conservative when it comes to functions and programs which I really like the way they are.
One reason for sticking with OS 9 as long as I have was the way I use ATM Deluxe: to me, its auto-activation function is THE way to save time when switching between jobs. As a freelance writer-designer of FontShop publications I use hundreds of fonts.

So let me get this straight. A font management program for me needs to have 3 features:
- auto-activation
- drag-and-drop creation of subsets (as in ATM-Deluxe)
- search feature based on parts of fontnames ("name contains...").
I understand FontBook won't give me that right now. What will, when switching to OS X?
Jan

More from MacInTouch:

Font Book limits

William Kyngesburye
Well, looks like Font Book is NOT font management for graphic artists. Not only is there a limit on the number of fonts that can be activated (understandable), but there is a limit on the number of fonts that Font Book can MANAGE.

It's not just font families, but individual font styles - when I was near the limit (I had 124 families, including Apple stuff and Classic fonts) and added another font family, it only added a few of the styles. Deleted a family, and I was able to add all of the incomplete family (so it's not corrupt fonts).

Also, some font names are strange - a small number, the family name, two asterisks, the style and a BIG number, ie "8 BauerBodoni** Black 09033". These names show up in any application that uses the OS X font panel for font selection. Apps that use internal font handling (Illustrator) show expected font names, no matter what Font Book says.

There seems to be random problems adding fonts as well - sometimes it won't.

You can't install and manage duplicate fonts, such as different versions (some clients are picky about versions). Probably has something to do with the PS font file names - while you can keep different suitcase names, PS file names are fixed, so you can't have two copies of the PS files in the font folder. No sub folder organization to work around this, unless you manually copy fonts to the fonts folder.

Back to SuitCase.


Adam Yellin
I tried using the Font Book instead of Suitcase and my fonts all came out jumbled, so went back to using Suitcase for now. There is nowhere I can find that even tells us how to use Font Book properly. Like how to remove fonts from it without deleting them from the drive entirely.

Are these reports useful here? If it's just clutter, let me know & I'll stop.

Well, I guess I'll try Panther and FontBook, but the way I work at the moment is to use Quark 4.1 on OS 9.1, with ATM Deluxe and Type Reunion -- which is what I really can't do without, because it means I don't have to scroll through a massive font list to find what I want, or go shift files around every time I start a new job.

Am I missing something? -- When I'm in InD in OS X, and go to choose a font, I get a mammoth list of every font on my hardrive, and when I scroll down I can never click on the typeface I want, because I'm always whizzing by on either side. Has Panther solved this problem?

Nick, as Stephen suggests, Font Agent Pro does group families together, exactly like Type Reunion.

Am I the only one who has problems running Photoshop and Font Agent Pro at the same time? I'm baffled.

I

I agree that Frank's suggestion will allow you to take advantage of some of the recent file system changes in OS X (journaling is a mightly nice safety feature to have), but be prepared to spend quite a bit more of your day migrating. The nice thing about Archive & Install is that you'll be upgraded and running again in under fifteen minutes. (On average anyway, your mileage may vary.)

Apparently you have to disable font book for any of the other font management software to work. The FontAgent web site has a how to.

I really wonder why this happened? Just curious, because the Panther Beta is out since almost half a year now, enough time for compatibility issues. Looks like Extensis had a bit of a nap ;)

Just a heads up - be sure to install Internet Explorer so you get Microsoft's web fonts (verdana, georgia), otherwise the web will look all a'mess. You can delete IE after if you'd like.

More info here:
http://www.exuberance.com/notes/2003/panther-fonts.html

Tiffany, I did a 'dirty' install on my pre-Quicksilver G4 (dual 450s). I was running a shoddy upgrade of 9.2 (from 9.1.2) and had non-critical problems all over. I was too eager to upgrade Friday night, so I just ran the Panther installer right over top of the old OS. It works flawlessly.

I had a problem once when it woke up stupid (after being asleep all night) and I lost fast user switching until I restarted, but that's been it. Everything came over fine.

However, I'd like to add that I don't have a font manager (besides Font Book) yet, so I can't comment on how that goes.

I'm very happy with Panther thus far. I work primarily with classic apps and they all work well (of course QX 4.1 still has redraw issues, like Jaguar). I have Jaguar on a much faster machine at work (quicksilver G4, dual 867s), and it runs comparably.

I've upgraded to panther and I have had some serious font issues. All was well. Was using suitcase in Panther and I had no problems. Then I remembered one of the reasons I had upgraded. Fontbook! Tried it out. Thought it was nice, but I still prefered Suitcase. Then later, I wanted to play some more in Fontbook but forgot to quit Suitcase. That is when all hell broke loose.

I'm still not certain what happened, but it seems that any of the fonts that I had in Fontbook became corrupted and Suitcase (and even Font Agent Pro) would balk at even the idea of using or adding them again into those apps.

Luckily, after wipping my system clean to figure this out, I just pulled the fonts that were damaged from some duplicates off a fireewire drive that I have and all seems to be working in the land of Panther.

Just thought I'd warn everyone to be VERY carefull about having Fontbook open with other font management apps.

WHOA WHOA WHOA
DAVE

UNPLUG YOUR FIREWIRE DRIVE IMMEDIATELY

There are SERIOUS problems with external firewire drives in panther

people are losing ALL of their data on those drives

Info here: Macintouch

sorry
overreacted a little.
=)

Thanks for the concern Drew, but my firewire drive is unaffected by the panther bug. Guess it was good in this case to have an older FireWire 400 drive

Consider Font Agent Pro. I liked it before on my dual G4, but on my loverly new AlBook it's wunderbar. No problems with Panther as far as I can tell.

Ya, I meant no problems with FAP & Panther. I'm having a few glitches, too. Mostly Eudora (5.2.1) is just painfully slow, but I'm afraid to go to 6 because some people have reported having whole mailboxes corrupted. I'm considering moving to Mail.app instead. What do the rest of y'all use for email in OS X? (Maybe this should a new thread.)

> I also love your picture

Thanks -- I've always wanted to be moir

We recently got the sweet Dual 2 G5 and were pumped about Font Book. Nothing but problems.

I tried to drag and drop fonts into FB and then it all got messed up. I tried to resolve the issue with Suitcase X1. Suitcase found over 200 corrupted fonts, cool problem fixed, right? No. There are still 168 fonts that Suitcase shows as installed, but don't actually exist. I can't get rid of them. It was taking our computer 5 minutes at least to load Flash.

Basically we have to reinstall Panther. I'm never opening FB again, and I think it's a joke that Apple released such a buggy program. Especially for a platform intended for designers. I've complained on Typotect enough, so I'm done.

Thanks for all of the above links, I can't wait to jump into them and find out the real deal.

All the Font Book features Joe talks about are available in
FontAgent Pro (minus the keycaps thing which is already
accessible through the "Character Palette" in OS X's input
menu). But FontAgent Pro (and the other third-party
managers) have one thing Font Book is missing: auto-
activation. For those who haven't benefited from the goodness
of this feature, it automatically activates all the fonts in any
Illustrator/Photoshop/Quark/InDesign document when you
open it. This saves a ton of time for those who have many
clients/jobs/fonts to work juggle.

Could Apple implement this in Font Book? Probably, and they
might do it better than Extensis or Insider. But will they? I
would be surprised. It would be the single feature that would
make those third party utilities obsolete, effectively pulling
the plug on an entire (though admittedly smallish) sector of
OS X software.

No, I don't see anything new going into Font Book.
It's an excellent manager for the majority of OS X users, the
sort of thing the Mac OS should have been built with from
the beginning. But pro users will need something more,
and it would be dumb for Apple to flip off two longstanding
developers and supply the goods themselves.

(pardon the poor writing. this was written too late at night.
gee, i wish i was still in the same time zone as all you kids.)