14/07/05
17A list of typography things
- I love shopping for type, and have just started a de.licio.us tag for typeIwanttobuy, a kind of Amazon wishlist. As you can see – they’re mostly from Veer. The experience of browsing, previewing and puchasing type from Veer is the best I’ve found anywhere, its a joy to use. The fact that you can preview your own text, and download a gif image (with no watermarks) is so much more usable than the normal flash-based font preview utilities.
- There are many ‘font finder’ type utilities on the interweb, but one I’ve recently discovered – Fontshop’s Type Navigator – is definitely worth a try.
- I recently gave the new improved-for-Tiger Apple Font Book at spin, and went through hell. I love the simple, ordered interface of the app, but it really caused suffering with my font menus. Typefaces that should’ve been disabled were showing up, and it was as slow as molasses. I went back to Suitcase X1, and all was well with the world once more – especially in my Adobe apps with fonts being auto-activated.
- The day I organised my fonts by foundry and added each foundry folder to Suitcase was time well spent. I don’t get out much.
- Welcome to the new type foundry Village, with the beautiful face Omnes by Joshua Darden, creator of the popular Freight Family. Expect to see this adorning freshly designed sites soon.
Tags: osx, software, typography
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Mike S. said 1186 days ago:
Thanks for the heads up Jon. Just checked out Omnes, very nice. Also checked out Type Navigator and found Roemisch Stehend Haar. I’m digging that one at the moment.matt Carey said 1186 days ago:
jon, how can you cope with suitcase? i’m a fontagent pro man and IMHO it beats suitcase hands down.A. Fruit said 1186 days ago:
Yeah, the font management thing just isn’t as good as it could be. I currently switched up from Suitcase to FontAgent Pro, because I was having problems with Suitcase and the auto-activation, not to mention it seemed to wreak havoc on my machine when many type-weilding applications were running (and that’s a dual G5 mind you).This is my (fantasy) font management app utopia:
An iTunes-esque application that stores, organizes, and labels fonts with smart-lists, rating systems, and has a store that you can browse typesets, and automatically purchase and download into your collection.
I can only hope that some one who pulls weight in the application development sector at Apple, is reading your blog, and this very comment. ;)
Stephen said 1186 days ago:
Perhaps something from the last two FontFont releases is worthy of your list: FF35 and FF36 . Also, I’ve been tossing up a weekly font pick at Newstoday . See the “QBN Typecase” in the left column.macx said 1186 days ago:
For my fonts on Mac I am using FontAgent Pro. After Testing of Suitcase I think FontAgent is more flexible, and much more cheaper. :-)Jon Hicks said 1186 days ago:
Guys, tell me more about FontAgent Pro. I’ve never used it, and while Suitcase doesn’t give me jip, I’d like to know if I’m missing out on something here.Stephen – thanks for the links!
Veerle Pieters said 1185 days ago:
Jon, I have been using FontAgent Pro since version 1. Before that I was a FontReserve user but that app isn’t so great anymore now that Extensis owns it. The first thing that I liked about FontAgent Pro is the way your fonts are organized in logical folders like A, B, C etc. That is a big difference with FontReserve. It is a 100% Cocoa app and it needs only minor updates between big system changes. Like Tiger for example: it worked but there were a few interface glitches and some weirdness with folders. But you could still use it. Minor updates are no trouble at all. The developers are reasonably fast if an update is required. Auto-activate fonts in most Mac OS X applications and it works seamlessly in the background so that it doesn’t bother you (big difference with Suitcase that needs to run). There is a lot more but it comes down to this: it feels and looks like a real Mac OS X program and is a joy to use.A. Fruit said 1185 days ago:
FontAgent copies all fonts into a separate FontAgent directory, which is an area of debate for many, some of which like this, and some of which don’t. I don’t really mind it because it organizes them alphabetically, and I can either keep a extra version of the imported font in a client or project folder (in the finder) or throw it away completely. (it’s sorta like itunes in this regard)My main reason for using it was that Suitcase was blundering on the auto-activation, that is, it rarely worked for me at all. With FontAgent, there is a Growl-like bezel that tells you which fonts are being activate upon opening a document. (Maybe is actually is Growl in tandem with FontAgent) Also, I was having long delays while activating fonts on Suitcase when I was running several Applications that would utilize type, and many times, I’d have to quit the application and restart it to get the font to show up in the menu. With FontAgent, I activate, there is a slight load time, then I go right back to my already open application, and there it is.
Organizing fonts is a snap because the way the window panes divide, you can view all of your font sets in 2 separate panes, and drag them around and re-organize really easy.
Other cool options are the Font Slide show (so I don’t have to manually scroll through thousands of type sets), automatic duplicate identification (upon font import), and identification of problematic font files, that it warns you about and sticks in a special folder.
With that said, I think FontAgent has a lot they can do to increase the visual appeal of their product. The icon graphics and color selections leave much to be desired for me. I find my self cringing at it’s visual aesthetic most of the time I use it. In this regard, they really need help.
Stephen said 1185 days ago:
Tack on another vote for FontAgent Pro . It’s still not perfect, but I’ve used it for 3 years without a major snag. Can’t say I’ve heard that from Suitcase users.clint said 1184 days ago:
Joshua Darden: brooklyn representin!sorry to hear about tiger font book, I was hoping that finally there would be an escape from suitcase.
neil said 1183 days ago:
Another vote for FontAgent Pro. It’s not perfect, but it kicks Suitcase’s ass three ways from Sunday. The font activation works much, much better than anything else out there, too.Paul D said 1183 days ago:
Just to throw out a dissenting view, I tried the FontAgent Pro demo and couldn’t get it to work (though it did hose my system for an hour while I figured out how to restore my system fonts).I’ve read reviews for every OS X font manager, and none seems to fit the bill so far, so I’m sticking with the mediocre Fontbook.
Kris Khaira said 1182 days ago:
Omnes is beautiful.I’m going to buy it when I get a credit card.
Vincent Grouls said 1181 days ago:
Rule number 1 when using Font Management apps: never use them to control your system fonts. It’s bad karma!FontAgent Pro rocks. The fact that it runs a daemon was the best reason for me to switch. Suitcase is slow activating and deactivating fonts and tends to slow your system down to a crawl.
There’s even settings if you wish to activate fonts upon restarting the daemon, separately for manually and auto-activated fonts!
That said, I’m gonna check out your del.icio.us tag and see if I can snap up some new fonts :D
Mark said 1180 days ago:
Slap me one up for FontAgent – without it, life has no meaning :)Jon Hicks said 1180 days ago:
While Font Agent Pro and Suitcase are the same price, and Suitcase’s Auto-activation for Adobe CS is better, I’ve been won over by:* Native cocoa app
* Activation in all cocoa apps, not just Adobe CS
* Doesn’t have to open for it to work!
So I’ve switched! Thanks for the recommendations everyone.
Alexis said 1178 days ago:
Hmm I thought I had posted this before but I must not have pressed submit. FAP is a wonderful app and one tip I can give is if you have a lot of fonts and are using the WYSIWYG menu you should take the time to scroll through the entire list at least once after installing your fonts, or any new ones. FAP seems to draw a tiff for every one of your fonts and for each size you preview the fonts at for the menu. Subsequent scrolls through the entire menu will be much faster once they have all been created. ~/Library/FontAgent Pro/FontImages is where all the TIFFS are created. Right now it looks like I have 8305 different tiff files at 8-20k each.