Mac OS 10.4 and Font Book 2
May 11th, 2005I previously reported that the font manager that I use, Suitcase, was working in Mac OS 10.4. And indeed, if you define working to be that it runs and opens the permanently activated fonts you have selected, then it does indeed work. Until you want to open new fonts. Then you are screwed.
One might panic at this point and start screaming or pulling hair or perhaps gripping the mouse so hard that one could feel the joints begin to buckle. This is normal. Indulge this until the deadline pressure begins to assert rationality to the hypothalamus.
I’m going to attempt to rescue someone in this position by suggesting heresy. Use Font Book 2.
First the good news: It works! It’s free! Restarts are much faster. The Finder appears much sooner. Apple has done some work and as per usual, not documented so much.
The bad news: it’s not so fast when you launch it. It takes some time to get itself in order. One will have to exercise patience with a ratio that increases with the number of fonts you want to have Font Book 2 manage.
So. Here’s the story of how I learned to stop loving Suitcase (I had an older version, but even the newer one doesn’t work with Tiger according to Extensis) and start being real.
After turning off all the fonts (I didn’t do this, but highly recommend one does) and then restarting, quit Suitcase and remove it. That means all of it. Use Spotlight to help you find any stray files. Dump them. Restart again. I know this is awfully Windows XP, but just trust me.
Once you’ve restarted, open Font Book 2. Do not open anything else, with the exception of something like Quicksilver, which you should be using and using often. There will be no difference to the naked eye between Font Book 1 and Font Book 2. Maybe that’s the bourbon talking, but I couldn’t detect anything. Until I did some reading. The new Font Book has some shit going on. It will open fonts from anywhere on your drive and KEEP THEM THERE. Aiiiight. Now we’re talking.
The one noticable thing is that there is a new menu item: “New Library”. This seems to be something different than a collection. Collections are a holdover from Font Book 1 and analagous to sets in Suitcase. Libraries? Something new entirely. Sort of. Libraries seem to differentiate themselves by icon and by placement in the Font Book sidebar. Libraries appear above the separator in the Collections pane. If you add a large number of fonts, say the Adobe Font Folio or dinc fonts, that could be unruly regardless of which font manager you chose. Even Suitcase blew when looking at a set with 500 font suitcases in it. So. Make a Library and navigate to wherever you have your fonts (in my case something like Agfa, with the folders divided by “A” “B” and so on) then shift select a few folders that you know contain subfolders with a shitload of fonts. Click the open button and WAIT.
In the lower right corner of Font Book 2, there is the OS X “something is happening” widget. Don’t install software or go surf. Just wait until that little fucker stops. Because Font Book is going to ACTIVATE all those fonts. Let it. Don’t freak out. Just let it do it’s thing. Once it’s done. Right or Control-click on the new library and choose “Disable XXXX” with XXXX being whatever you called your Library. This shouldn’t take too long.
Hey! It works! One might notice that there is also menu item called “Export Collection…”. Guess what? Apple knows that one might need to send fonts to a pre-press bureau and have made it easy to do this. Although in this day and age, I have NO CLUE why dumbass designers insist on not generating print PDFs (with all the marks and color bars) like a civilized, rational being. Alas, that is a subject for another day. Any good press will take your print resolution PDF with open arms…
So. We know how to add many fonts and turn them off. After the epiphany, one could then go through and turn off any of the 10,000 fonts that Apple bundles with 10.4. Some of these include fonts that previously required diving into the myriad font folders in OS X and changing permissions et al.
Issues? Questions? Post them in the comments. I’ve been using Font Book with all the big apps and haven’t had one issue yet. Plus, it has yet to crash when previewing, something that happened all the time in Suitcase. o
May 12th, 2005 at 12:49 am
Blurb, at how many fonts used to you recommend using font management software? Does Font Book 2 make all active fonts available to all applications? Thanks!
May 12th, 2005 at 2:05 am
I’ve looked at Font Book before, and liked what I saw. What kept me using Suitcase X1 was the auto-activation feature for Adobe CS apps. So I guess my question is the same as Broch’s - does it make fonts available to apps that have already opened? If so, I’m sold.
BTW - using Suitcase X1 on Tiger seems to work fine (so far). Apart from the annoying dock bouncing just to tell you that its ‘initializing the database’ (but thats always been the case).
May 12th, 2005 at 7:49 am
I never got auto-activation to work properly with Suitcase. But I never upgraded to X1.
It works with Apple apps, for sure (TextEdit!). Fireworks, not so much. But Fireworks has always required a quit/relaunch cycle to get new fonts loaded.
Broch, I’d guess that someone working at a pre-press or production shop would want a heavy-weight font management app (like server storage, access to multiple users, etc), but for most users, Font Book is enough.
I was making a PDF and InDesign reported a missing font. I turned it on in font book and the alert went away on it’s own. I would assume that all Adobe CS apps are Font Book aware. I’ll do some more work today to verify.
May 12th, 2005 at 8:26 am
Seems like something to look forward to, just a few questions:
Is it possible to activate just one of the fonts in a certain library on its own? Does Font Book 2 copy the fonts to its own folders or do they stay where they are (as with Suitcase)?
May 12th, 2005 at 9:08 am
Broch/Hicks:
Just tested Illustrator. Had an open document and launched Font Book (another nice feature… doesn’t have to be running ALL THE TIME) and activated a font. Illustrator saw it, no problem.
wwform:
Yes, it is possible to activate just one of the fonts in a certain library. Font Book may copy fonts, but I’m not 100% sure how it works, just that it does and leaves your source fonts alone, as with Suitcase.
May 12th, 2005 at 3:20 pm
Okay, I am offically sold on Tiger… that was my #1 complaint with Panther, Font Book sucked, well that and the other quirky bullshit that they seemed to have worked out.
I still am bitter towards Adobe for not doing ATM anymore, back in the OS9 days, ATM kicked Suitcase’s ass. The one thing I want it to do, that I doubt it will do, but maybe you can answer, is if you open a file with a font that ISN’T activated, but in your library, will it activate that font automatically like ATM used to do? That would be bliss…
May 12th, 2005 at 3:43 pm
anyone using Font Agent Pro?
I was a Suitcase chap on OS9 and WinXP, but was never quite at ease with it (crashtastic). FAP seems much the same featurewise, although it has a nice itunes-esque consolidation gizmo that finally tidied up my font colleciton after years of random filing. Interface seems a little crowded and could benefit from some Apple HIG love though.
May 12th, 2005 at 9:27 pm
IMHO, all the font managers have issues - can’t someone build a killer app? Font book is only fair - and the early version definitely had issues - which I live with till I go Tiger. Anybody out there use any shareware apps?
May 12th, 2005 at 9:33 pm
Jon, This and similar posts on your blog could be written in Russian for all I know. However, I just had to write and tell you as a person who wishes she had an understanding sufficient to allow me to make sense of what you have written, I think it is so amazingly generous of you to take the time and trouble to share your knowledge like this. I don’t even understand manuals unless they say “Dawn, this is the way you do that specific thing you want to do, now, step one, Dawn …..” I am not going to read the other comments as if they are as technical as your post is, I won’t understand them. I just hope your audience appreciate you and again, I applaud you for being one super nice human!
May 12th, 2005 at 10:52 pm
dawn, i think what you wrote was awesome, and i’m now going to start reading your blog, which looks really friendly, fyi. the world needs more folks like you. rock on, dawn! rock on, jon.
May 13th, 2005 at 12:39 am
Jon, you better have bought that domain we talked about you bastard!!!
(j/k)
See you tomorrow (or today, early morning that is) homie.
May 13th, 2005 at 9:01 am
As a designer I’ve used pretty much every font management suite available, and I just love Font Book so much. It’s so simple even my fiance can use it on my home Mac without buggerin my fonts up again. Ahem. So, I’m looking forward to getting Tiger!
P.S. We use Adobe Type Manager at my current workplace. I hate it. HATE IT. Are you readin this, Boss?
May 15th, 2005 at 1:17 pm
Wow. I really wish I’d been designing on a Mac at work over the last year, now. Font Book would have been really useful.
Also, because you know your stuff: I’m in the market for a laptop — doing light design work, word processing and possibly bookkeeping for a newspaper. What would the advantages of a Mac be?
May 15th, 2005 at 3:10 pm
Samantha,
Mac advantage? For a laptop: price. The apple laptops, either ibook or powerbook are very price competitive. For what you get, the ibooks are particularly a good value. Plus, their battery life is much better than other laptops. My IBM T40 has about an hour or so before I lose power. Our ibook can go 2, 2.5 hours on average, more if we cycle the battery properly.
I think the lack of virii for the mac is a good reason right now. That could change any time, though.
The ibook we have is 3 years old and been through a lot. Still ticking away. I think it’s one of the best machines I’ve ever owned.
May 15th, 2005 at 11:28 pm
this was helpful and informative.
May 16th, 2005 at 11:40 am
Jon, I wish I knew all the junk that you know.
May 17th, 2005 at 4:12 pm
@Hicks:
Auto-activation in Photoshop CS2 works fine, I’ve just tried it out.
My experience with this thingy:
With each release of OSX I gave Fontbook a new chance. So I did this time. It became much better, seems to run stable now, even when importing a whole library like Linotype, it does its job. In the past releases I always threw it away and got crazy because of this “set” activating whatsoever mess… when you delete a set all your fonts are unsorted, yepee and still there. Same happened this time. Guys, don’t create a set, import your fonts in there, because Fontbook just copies them into your User/Library/Fonts folder, which isn’t good :). So I deleted all fonts inside the set first, and the set afterwards but that doesn’t delete them from your Fonts folder. ARGH!!! 2800 fonts and you are the one to find the lately imported.
Jon, your description does the tric, thank you. Use new libraries instead. It keeps the path to your original font files. Now I love FontBook 2 *hug*
@Junap
Font Agent Pro isn’t bad.
May 18th, 2005 at 6:40 am
I was nervous about using Font Book but after reading this article I gave it a go. In Panther FontAgent Pro was far and away the best font management app, letting you create separate libraries and nested sets. However, after doing a clean install into Tiger FAP started acting very buggy so I ditched it and thought I’d try out Font Book 2.
So far, so good. I’ve installed about 900 (of 1700) fonts into separate libraries and they all activate fine. It takes a little over a minute when I first open it to create the font database. So, if you have alot of fonts and you need to access them alot you might be better off just leaving the app up and running.
I would recommend Designers giving it a shot instead of using that hunk of crap Suitcase. Meanwhile, I’ll wait and see when FAP comes out with a Tiger-ready version.
JF
May 18th, 2005 at 10:51 am
I’ve been using FontAgent Pro 3 with Tiger for a couple of weeks now with no problems (well, aside from a few bugs that it already had under Panther). It’s fast, and I love how you don’t have to have it running constantly (cough Suitcase cough) for it to auto-activate fonts.
Still, it’s good to know there’s an alternative with Font Book 2.
May 27th, 2005 at 7:06 pm
This is excellent news! I’ve long felt that solid font management should be something built into an OS and with Panther we *finally* started seeing this happen.
Of all the talk lately about 10.4, this is the first mention I’ve read of Font Book being updated. Now I really really need to get off my lazy bum and order Tiger.
May 29th, 2005 at 2:25 pm
I’ve worked through the Font Book 2 suggestions above, but any idea how you can get to fonts to appear organized in a program like back in the days we used Adobe Type Reunion?
May 31st, 2005 at 5:07 pm
I’ve given Font Book a shot over the last few weeks, but I’m now back on Suitcase X1 now. Font Book would consume huge amounts of memory, and large amounts of deactivated fonts would show up in apps font menus - back on Suitcase and I get neither of these problems. I really liked Font Book, maybe with the next version I’ll switch.
May 31st, 2005 at 5:21 pm
Jon, thanks for the update. I’m still holding strong to Font Book. My work life is pretty boring font-wise and I’m not called upon to use a huge library of fonts; or open and close them all day long.
June 8th, 2005 at 12:29 pm
Quick update with my experiences using Font Book 2. Like previous poster noted, I was having 10-15 fonts deactivated fonts activating upon every restart and another 10-15 deactivated fonts showing up in Macromedia apps. Hung up the system trying to import fonts at around the 1500 mark so I trimmed my library down to about 1300. App very slow to open and load all fonts (90 secs) and seemed sluggish activating and deactivating fonts in general. So, it seems unready for designers/users who work with fonts all day and need professional management. Should be fine for folks with 500 or less fonts. I’m back to FAP which works great again after their recent update (3.02) which works out the previous glitches in Tiger.