Tag Archives | graphic design

For the last few weeks, I’ve been hav­ing a lot of issues with my font man­age­ment soft­ware. For a Web or graphic designer, a good font man­age­ment pro­gram is very impor­tant so I’ve been scram­bling to find solutions.

I had been using Extensis Suitcase for a long time but the Windows ver­sion doesn’t have a proper search fea­ture and that is some­thing that can really help when you are look­ing for fonts for a project. That’s why I had been exper­i­ment­ing with other apps. One of those apps was Proxima Software’s FontExpert. But the thing is, both have pros and cons and I basi­cally used one for a while and the other for a while then back again. Want exam­ples of things one does well while the other doesn’t? here it goes:

Suitcase Pros:

• It is a mature app with a pol­ish that is hard to beat
• It has a very stream­lined and easy to use UI
• It comes with auto­matic font acti­va­tion plu­g­ins for both Illustrator and InDesign and, cou­pled with is FontSense tech­nol­ogy, they work very well.

Suitcase Cons:

• It lacks a search fea­ture in the Windows version
• It is harder on resources than FontExpert as it uses a res­i­dent ser­vice that start with every Windows boot.
• It’s acti­va­tion process depends on the infa­mous “Bonjour Service” (more on that later).

FontExpert Pros

• It has a very exten­sisve fea­ture set that includes tag­ging and cat­e­go­riz­ing fonts and search­ing them.
• It offers access to detailed infor­ma­tion for each font.
• It is very light on resources

FontExpert Cons

• Its inter­face can be con­fus­ing, espe­cially its imple­men­ta­tion of Groups and Worklists and what each is used for. Suitcase is a lot eas­ier to deal with in that regard.
• Documentation is lacking
• It has an auto acti­va­tion plu­gin only for InDesign and the CS3 ver­sion is flaky. It was pre­vent­ing InDesign to load for me so I had to unin­stall the plugin.

Up to a few weeks ago, I was using Suitcase because, even with­out search, its oper­a­tion was more trou­ble free and it really worked well with InDesign and Illustrator when I ope­nend a filed that used fonts that were unin­stalled. But one day, it stopped load­ing on Windows startup or man­u­ally. After a bit of detec­tive work I real­ized that the issue was tied to the “Bonjour Service”. No mat­ter what I try, I can­not get that stu­pid ser­vice to start and Suitcase depends on it being started to start itself.

I tried down­load­ing the lat­est ver­sion of Bonjour from Apple but that won’t start either. I have made no change pur­pose­fuly to my machine that could explain this. Maybe some kind of Windows update is pre­vent­ing Bonjour to start but I have no idea why and no amount of Googling has given me a solu­tion. Extensis are no help.

I had no choice but to unin­stall Suitcase and install FontExpert. But I started hav­ing prob­lems with that too. Fonts would not dis­play cor­rectly within the app nor within appli­ca­tions using them even if they were acti­vated. They defaulted to a basic sans-​serif that looked noth­ing like the type­face I was using. So I was screwed and I needed to find another font man­age­ment appli­ca­tion. I’m start­ing a new project these days and it includes the cre­ation of a logo so I need to look at a lot of fonts…

After a bit of research I found Hi-​Logic MainType. It looks a bit like FontExpert but more stream­lined and its Group fea­tures is directly linked to fold­ers on your machine which is a lot closer to how Suitcase worked. All fonts dis­play cor­rectly in it and it has a “fil­ter” fea­ture that helps find fonts based on sev­eral cri­te­ria and it seems to work quite well. I’ll see how it works for me over time.

In the mean­time, if any of you that read this blog have expe­ri­enced prob­lems with the Bonjour Service fail­ing to start or have heard of a solu­tion to that prob­lem then please, post a com­ment here. Suitcase is not the only app depend­ing on it and I would love to fix this issue on this machine.