Font Management...Arghhhh!

[chris82]

What font management utilities to you guys use. I have tried Extensis X1, but it didn't work well with Mac OSX Leopard. I used Linotype's free utility which i enjoyed but it kept crashing my Adobe Distiller (i don't know why). Does anyone have any suggestions?

[PrintDriver]

Many here seem to use Linotype but it may be Leopard itself that is causing your problems. That OS is buggier than a biker's teeth as far as I'm concerned. I have one guy on it here. Headaches.

[DesignVHL]

Well, then, I am glad i hopped into this thread. I have leopard on an xternal HD for testing right now - barely touched it - too much work and don't want to screw up my workflow right now. Waiting till mid jan to see if the bugs are being more worked out. How stupid of me, I bought it, and now I'm not even using it! Oh well. I LOVE EXTENSIS though, and I don't want to give it up! :P Guess I'll stay w/ tiger for a bit....

[Menkerios]

I use Linotype. And use sets and smart sets (the latter are wonky on leopard).
I organize first by historical category (sans, serif, script, fraktur, dingbats, etc) and use 'labels' to colorcode according to such basic categories.
From there, I also drag them into however many style categories as apply ("spooky, hitech, cold war, etc.")

That gives me multiple ways to activate and deactivate large amounts of fonts so I have just what i need for a job, and makes it easy to find exactly the fonts I want. (for example, I can browse through 'cold war' fonts and see instantly which are serifs, script, sans, etc).
I only have 5000, but I could handle alot more than that with this system.

Leopard is wonky about keeping things color coded (they reset to blank sometimes) but its easy enough to recolor them.

http://i64.photobucket.com/albums/h161/blackgas/fontxplorer.jpg

[urstwile]

I have to second Menkerios, although I don't use Linotype Explorer with Leopard, as we haven't gone that route yet (nor do I want us to). I categorize things in smart sets (I don't color code them though), and in addition, for regular clients, I'll make client folders, so that I can activate their brand fonts with a click. So far, it's worked like a charm. I haven't had the same weird problems I used to have sometimes with Suitcase, at least after we switched to OS X.

[tZ]

I just purchased suitcase after being a long time linotype user and think its much better. I especially like the auto-activation feature and vault(database) in comparison to the linotypes management capabilities(folders) and capacities. I also like the ability to add metdata to specific fonts and families. However, that feature may be available in linotype. Linotype is great – especially for free but, the added features and capabilities of suitcase are worth the $100 in my opinion. Something I noticed with linotype also is that it lagged at times. Suitcase this never happens. What I mean by lag is when I activated a font the app would pause (freeze) for a few seconds before checking it. This has yet to happen with the suitcase app even when activating a large amount of fonts or families at once. I will say that it was money well spent and would recommend it if you have a large amount fonts to manage. If you don't have a large amount of fonts to manage then it might just be better to use the linotype for the time being until you build up a larger library. For how much it cost linotype is a great alternative.

[carter the artist]

menk,

That's what I've been trying to do forever.

Could you post a full listing of your hierarchy?

[Menkerios]

My pleasure.

For starters:

Serif:
+Modern (Bodoni, etc)
+Slab Serif
--Block
--Clarendon
--Typewriter
+Old Style
--Garalde (Garamond, etc.)
--Venetian (Jenson, etc.)
+Ornamental (Fancy serif typefaces, like victorian titling stuff)
+Small Serif (copperplate, etc.)
+Transitional (Times new roman, etc.

Sans:
+Geometric (Futura, Century Gothic)
+Grotesque (Franklin Gothic)
+Humanist (Lucida, etc.)
+NeoGrotesque (Helvetica, Arial, etc.)

Dingbats: (all symol/picture fonts, wingings, etc.)

Mixed: (mixed sans/cursive/serif faces, overprinted faces, etc.)

Script:
+Comic (comic sans, etc.)
+Graffitti
+Handwritten
+Script (brush script, any cursives, etc.)

Fraktur: (blackletter, old english etc.)


For less formal additional categories, check out DaFont and other font sites, they have the usual kind... I will list more of mine in a later post..
Above all, put each font in as many appropriate categories as possible, so you can easily find them and activate/deactivate them.

To find out what fonts go into which category, read up on typography -- its a great excercise, you learn alot going through each face and categorizing them. Its not an exact science of course (i have way too many humanist faces, for example, because so many modern faces fall into this category)

[Drazan]

I use Linotype at home and am "testing" it out at work. The most annoying thing ever is having it popup to buy these odd "ghost" fonts. Gulim is one of them. I'd launch something and it would popup to buy a font, even when the font is already installed and active.

Second annoyance is having it "take" all the system fonts out of the system folder. I had to put them back in the windows font folder else I couldn't make any PDFs from a word doc. And I'd get this most annoying popup from outlook. All the KB articles said that I was missing my registration number. Which I wasn't. What I was missing was courier system fonts and other system fonts.

I'm holding out that they'll make it more stable. I'm currently sorting something like 13,400 fonts. And today, I still had to go find a font the customer was using that I didn't have. lol

Jade

[budafist]

I would absolutely love to put our work fonts into style categories, but my staff don't know anything about fonts let alone the names of their sub categories. The only categories I could have are sans, serif, handwritten and script. Oldstyle? Modern? Humanist? My workmates would think I'm nuts.

[tZ]

This is interesting

http://www.paratype.com/help/class/

If anyone has any others don't hesitate to share.

[budafist]

That's a great link tZ. If only the type examples were images rather than links to buy would make it perfect. Then I could print for reference :)

[urstwile]

My pleasure.

For starters:

Serif:
+Modern (Bodoni, etc)
+Slab Serif
--Block
--Clarendon
--Typewriter
+Old Style
--Garalde (Garamond, etc.)
--Venetian (Jenson, etc.)
+Ornamental (Fancy serif typefaces, like victorian titling stuff)
+Small Serif (copperplate, etc.)
+Transitional (Times new roman, etc.

Sans:
+Geometric (Futura, Century Gothic)
+Grotesque (Franklin Gothic)
+Humanist (Lucida, etc.)
+NeoGrotesque (Helvetica, Arial, etc.)

Dingbats: (all symol/picture fonts, wingings, etc.)

Mixed: (mixed sans/cursive/serif faces, overprinted faces, etc.)

Script:
+Comic (comic sans, etc.)
+Graffitti
+Handwritten
+Script (brush script, any cursives, etc.)

Fraktur: (blackletter, old english etc.)


For less formal additional categories, check out DaFont and other font sites, they have the usual kind... I will list more of mine in a later post..
Above all, put each font in as many appropriate categories as possible, so you can easily find them and activate/deactivate them.

To find out what fonts go into which category, read up on typography -- its a great excercise, you learn alot going through each face and categorizing them. Its not an exact science of course (i have way too many humanist faces, for example, because so many modern faces fall into this category)

Wow, that's scarily similar to my system, although I don't do the color coding thing. :D I adore the Smart Sets feature in Linotype Explorer, it makes it easy to have the same font in a couple of different categories, because many of them could easily fall into a few.

[moot]

I'm using Suitcase Fusion and while it does the job, there are a few minor annoyances I've dealt with. It could be my inexperience, but I might as well...

1. Fonts don't always activate immediately, I have to give focus back to Suitcase and reactivate the font, and return to inDesign sometimes.
2. Font organization doesn't appear to allow for hard links (smart sets) like Linotype does, and requires a great deal of manual preening. Sets don't display font counts for subsets.
3. Sorting by class doesn't work in Font Family view, and not all fonts have a classification in their metadata.
4. You can't choose a preference in the incidence of font conflicts.

However, it does have the Font Vault that supposedly safeguards your fonts from corruption and makes for easy backup, FontSense to deal with conflicts (neither of which I've really seen in action yet), and has otherwise done the job for the last several months. The previews are very usable and customers enjoy flipping through with its browser. Also, it is compatible with the Suitcase and Font Reserve server software. I may try Linotype again when I clean up the other machines at work.
:moot:

[Broacher]

Does anyone else ever feel like checking what century we're in after a solid round of font chasing on today's OS's? I do understand that fonts operate at a much darker, murkier level of the OS designaverse, but why does the total time spent of chasing font problems today still seem so high?

And, for what it's worth-- why is it that even my very old versions of CorelDraw can install missing fonts on the open-file-fly when ID and AI can't? Maybe that's a Windows-only reality, but it's a real time-waster for us to constantly keep our active font collections in synch here.

[monstruo]

I use font agent pro and suitcase.

Suitcase does most of the work. The only thing i like abour FAP, it scan for corupted fonts. That's useful for those free fonts downloaded from net. You never know which are corrupted ones.