There were a few additional resources that did not fit in our rundown on font management applications. So continuing our Font School series, here are a few additional apps and articles on fonts.

Some Reading

• Best Practices for Managing Fonts in Mac OS X – 5th Edition — This free PDF from Extensis is a great place to start to learn more about font management.
• Take Control of Fonts in Leopard — A $15 e-book from TidBITS publishing that is a wealth of knowledge about fonts and font management. I love how it walks you through finding all your fonts and organizing them. Highly recommended.
• Take Control of Font Problems in Leopard — A $10 e-book from TidBITS, this book focuses on fixing problems with fonts and is a great resource for anyone that supports designers.

Font Utilities

There are a few really important steps to fixing fonts — scan for corrupt fonts, identify font ID conflicts, and clear font caches. There are at least two dedicated utilities for this purpose.

• Smasher is included with FontAgent Pro and helps organize font suitcases and fix bad fonts. It is available for purchase separately as well.
• FontDoctor is included for free when you purchase Suitcase Fusion 2, or you can purchase it separately for $69.95. FontDoctor fixes common font problems and includes basic organization tools.

For most people, you would be better off to look at the professional font management apps like FontExplorer X Pro, FontAgent Pro, and Suitcase Fusion 2 which include these features.

Font Servers

The font management apps that I covered in the font management article are focused on managing fonts for a single workstation. If you need the ability to control fonts centrally to enforce uniformity or to track licensing so that fonts are only installed on certain machines, you may want to look into a font server. Here are the popular solutions, available from the same companies that make the desktop products included in the font management review.

• Extensis Universal Type Server Pro
• Extensis Universal Type Server Lite
• FontAgent Pro Workgroup Edition
• FontAgent Pro Server
• FontExplorer X Server

Technical Details on Mac OS X Typography

Apple publishes a fair bit of information on everything going on under the hood with your fonts in the Text & Fonts section of their developer web site.

Creating Fonts

If you are interested in designing your own fonts, then you will want to check out FontLab and see what they have cooking.

Web Typography

Rich typography on the web is limited to rendering out text as image files, or using CSS to specify certain fonts that you are reasonably assured are available on both platforms. You might also check out the sIFR project for another take on how to use your favorite font faces on the web. I also really like this reference article from Smashing Magazine on 50 Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography.

Where Are They Now?

Some of you may be familiar with other font management apps and are wondering why I didn’t include those in my font management apps article. Here’s a list of apps that have fallen behind over the last few years.

• MasterJuggler was last updated in July 2005. A very good tool in its time, this utility from Alsoft (publishers of DiskWarrior) has been left in the dust by the competition.
• Font Reserve is owned by Extensis, the makers of Suitcase Fusion 2, and was discontinued January 1, 2007.
• Fontographer was last updated on March 31, 2006.
• Adobe Type Manager Deluxe, or ATM Deluxe as we all knew it, is no longer necessary under OS X. Yes, we all had it back in the day and I included it here more out of a sense of nostalgia and respect for how important this was to Apple in the 90′s. ATM Deluxe was probably the most widely pirated software of that era too. If you still need font management in Classic, you can download Adobe Type Manager Light for free.

If you know of any other font resources, please take the time to post a link in the comments below and share with the rest of us.

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Because of the Mac’s wide adoption in the desktop publishing and design world, managing fonts in OS X has long been an important, if unpleasant, task. The Apple tools have always been meager, but Leopard has made important improvements to Font Book, the system utility for managing installed fonts. However, there are still circumstances in which you may want to enlist the help of additional tools to get your fonts into shape.

Continuing our Font School series, I will outline the areas where font management software can help. Also, be sure to read our overview of Font Management Apps for the Mac.

Why Do I Need to Manage Fonts?

There are two general reasons why you would want to enlist software to help manage your fonts. The first, and most obvious, opportunity is simply to get a better handle on the fonts that are available for use in your designs or documents. If you work in a group or team, then it becomes even more important that everyone have the same fonts so you can more easily pass work around without experiencing weird font substitution problems.

The second opportunity is to improve system and application performance. Mac OS X Leopard does just fine with several hundred individual font variations in a few hundred families. When you get beyond that, into thousands of fonts, the system starts to slow down and certain applications take forever to update font menus or even launch. You will want a tool that can activate only the fonts that you need to keep things running nice and lean. Also, some applications like Adobe Creative Suite, QuarkXpress, and Microsoft Office manage their own fonts and font management tools can help you consolidate control.

When Fonts Go Bad

The other important reason for good font management practices, and good font management tools, is to provide you with some assistance in sorting out problems. The most common problems are the system locking up or dropping into a kernel panic when trying to load a bad font or in the event of a Font ID conflict. Good font management software should help you find corrupt fonts and ID conflicts and deal with them. Other problems are generally caused by bad font substitution (the system picking the wrong font and displaying gobbledygook in your email or browser) or corrupt font caches (gobbledygook characters written on top of each other and other nonsense). Good font management software helps manage these issues or at least helps clean up the mess.

Common Problems

Font Cache Corruption

The System, Word, and Adobe all keep their own font cache to speed up on-screen rendering. If the cache becomes corrupt, you will see all sorts of weird behavior. The symptoms include weird characters all printed on top of each other. The fix? Simply flush the cache. In the case of the system cache, you will need to restart the computer when you do so. Most font utilities include a tool to flush these font caches. I like the free Linotype FontExplorer X myself.

Font ID Conflicts

Font ID conflicts prevent the system from loading all the fonts properly. The most common symptom is that the computer will simply not boot except in safe mode. If the system boots, but then hangs when trying to login to a user account, you probably have a conflict (or maybe a corrupt font) in the User font library. Font management software can help you find ID conflicts and resolve them.

Corrupt Fonts

Fonts, just like other files, can become corrupt. If this happens, the system will often hang because fonts are loaded at such a low level in the operating system. There are a few font utilities that can scan for corrupt fonts. FontDoctor and Smasher are two that are available today. Good font management software will scan for corrupt fonts as they are added to the library and FontAgent Pro will also check as fonts are activated.

Font Substitution

Many times, documents specify the font that they are using in a non-specific way. A great example is a CSS stylesheet that asks for Times. There are several variants of the Times font and sometimes your system will pick the wrong one when trying to render the text on the screen. If you see nonsense text or characters in your email or your web browser, you almost certainly have a font substitution problem. The fix is to deactivate the problem font.

Pro Tip: If you see gobbledygook in email or in your browser, try deactivating Helvetica Fraction or Times Phonetic because these seem to be the most common problems. If you need more help, check out the very well written, and relatively inexpensive, e-book from TidBITS publishing titled, Take Control of Font Problems in Leopard.

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If you are a designer, then you know the joy of having thousands and thousands of fonts available to use in your projects. You probably are also familiar with the despair of waiting for apps to launch, font menus to draw, and the horror of kernel panics when you get Font ID conflicts, the stray corrupt font, or your careful layout explodes when your app makes the wrong font substitution.

Font management has always been one of those dirty little secrets that no one really wants to deal with, but if you are serious about fonts, you need to enlist some tools to help you manage those fonts and fix common problems.

Continuing our Font School series, here’s the rundown on what font management apps are available for your Mac.

Font Book

Font Book has been included with OS X since Panther (10.3). The latest release in Leopard includes the ability to print out a book of fonts (so you have a ready reference for what the typefaces look like), validate fonts (to check for corruption), and the new ability to automatically activate fonts as they are needed (so that your documents display correctly even if the required font had been deactivated on your system).

Font Book manages your system and user fonts and helps provide easy activation and deactivation of individual fonts or collections (user-defined groups of fonts). Leopard also has a new feature to protect system fonts and replace required fonts if they have been removed by the user — something to be aware of when making changes with any of the following tools.

Linotype FontExplorer X

The only free option, besides Font Book, is the excellent Linotype FontExplorer X, which has just recently seen its last release. FontExplorer X improves on Font Book with better tools for managing fonts, auto-activation plug-ins for Adobe CS1-CS3 and QuarkXpress 6.5 and 7.x, and utilities to fix common font problems. You can buy fonts from the Linotype online store directly within the application.

I recommend Linotype FontExplorer X for anyone that needs font management and can live with the plug-in support (that is, you don’t need CS4 or QuarkXpress 8). Besides being free (a key factor in my recommendation), Linotype FontExplorer X is easy to use, gives you feedback when it is making changes (integrated with Growl, if you like), lets you clear font cache problems and quickly identify conflicts. I like how the application allows you to copy your fonts into the library and manage them in sets that can be automatically activated as needed for certain applications. The interface borrows heavily from iTunes, but this makes it easy to use.

FontExplorer X Pro

FontExplorer X Pro adds the fancy new suffix to its name in the latest 2.0 release along with a switch to a paid model. For $79 you get plug-in support for Photoshop CS3, the CS4 Suite and QuarkXpress 8. FontExplorer X Pro also works with the new FontExplorer X Server for central font management. Other improvements over the free version include a configurable toolbar and a new Quick Install feature that lets you automate the installation options to duplicate your settings on other machines in your shop. WYSIWYG view is relatively fast thanks to pre-rendered font previews.

If you have been using FontExplorer X, then upgrading to Pro makes sense if you need plug-in support for the latest Adobe and Quark apps. The server features could be nice in a shop that requires centralized control or licensing management. Otherwise, consider using the free version until you need the features in the paid version.

FontAgent Pro

FontAgent Pro 4 by Inside Software is another choice for full-featured font management, available for $99. This application has a very similar feature set to FontExplorer X Pro, including plug-ins for the current versions of Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXpress for automatic activation of font sets. FontAgent Pro does a nice job of automatically categorizing your fonts as it imports them and giving you options for organizing them.

The WYSIWYG view is reasonably fast thanks to background processing of font profiles and previews. The search feature lets you enter multiple conditions or use keywords to find precisely the font you need. These conditions are also used to create smart sets, or dynamic groups of fonts (think smart playlists in iTunes). You can buy fonts directly inside the application from myfonts.com. FontAgent Pro comes with the Smasher utility for organizing and fixing font suitcases.

Suitcase Fusion 2

Suitcase Fusion 2 by Extensis has a long history that goes back over a decade to its early days as Suitcase by Symantec. This latest version is quite good and much improved over previous incarnations. It includes many of the same features as the previous apps. You’ve got auto-activation, font classifications, smart sets, previews, printable font books, and more. Plug-ins are limited to InDesign and Illustrator CS3 & CS4, and QuarkXpress 7 & 8. If you want auto-activation for Photoshop you will want to get FontExplorer or FontAgent.

There are two small details that I really like in Suitcase Fusion 2. One is the preview windows for fonts or sets can be “torn” off and hover on your display. You can mouse over these preview windows and use them to turn on (or off) font sets. This is a great addition to auto-activation and gives you another visual clue about which fonts are currently activated. Another detail I like is that the auto-activation process is managed with a new system preference item. The other apps launch a background daemon and place it in your login items without really telling you what it is doing. This invisible daemon is difficult to turn off. Suitcase requires that its daemon be running in the background to operate (as do all these programs) but I really like that I could go to the System Preferences pane and turn it off if I wanted to, say, test a bunch of font management apps that would otherwise conflict. Suitcase Fusion 2 includes the Font Doctor utility for resolving common font problems.

Fontcase

Fontcase is the new kid on the block, only released this past January. For a 1.0 release, Fontcase shows a lot of polish and the price is reasonable at $46. This app does not have auto-activation or plug-ins to manage Adobe or Quark application fonts, but it does an excellent job of displaying your font library and allowing you to create sets (including smart sets). The font browser is the fastest of the bunch, especially in grid view (the font card view in the screenshot below). Outline view (similar to the views in the other apps) is a tad slower, but still faster than the other apps in WYSIWYG mode.

Fontcase offers a really polished interface for managing and interacting with your fonts. If you like the iTunes metaphor in FontExplorer X Pro, you will love Fontcase. I really dig the tagging system, which is perfect for fonts and a bit more accessible than the keywords or notes features in the other apps. The printed font books are beautiful and miles better than what is available in competing apps. The downside is that you are lacking some of the really useful and practical features of the other apps like auto-activation, tools to resolve font problems, and background operations for activation/deactivation. Those features are apparently being planned, but the current lack of tools may deter professionals that are looking to take active control of thousands of fonts. Many people will be better served by the free Linoype FontExplorer X.

One feature that many people will find useful is the Bonjour font sharing technology in Fontcase. You can share your font vault over the local network and other Macs running Fontcase can download fonts into their own vault. This provides a simple way to keep workstations in the same shop in sync with fonts. Fontcase does not offer centralized license management or monitoring like the dedicated font server apps do so you’ll have to watch things yourself to make sure that you are legal with your font usage in a design shop setting. Be cautious with this feature though — sharing of fonts around the office is what usually gets people into font management trouble in the first place.

So Which is Right for Me?

First thing is to check out Linotype FontExplorer X. If you are working with Adobe CS3 (or earlier), this is a no brainer. You get excellent font management, utilities to fix problems, and auto-activation with the plug-ins for your apps. If you are using CS4 or QuarkXpress 8, then you will want to check out FontExplorer X Pro. The other pro apps (FontAgent Pro and Suitcase Fusion 2) are comparable. I would encourage you to download the free trials that are available for all of them and check them out for yourself.

If you are a home user or just want pretty font books, then by all means check out Fontcase. It allows you to manually manage your font sets fairly well and I love the UI for classifying and organizing fonts, but the auto-activation and features in the other apps are a real life-saver for a design professional that is working with a library of thousands of fonts.

Which font management application do you prefer (and why)?

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It might sound crazy today, but fonts were one of the first things that really got me interested in computers. Computer typography was a constantly evolving industry in the ’80s and ’90s. A certain part of my personal interest developed because I went to high school with a kid whose dad turned out to be a rock star of computer typography. You see, his dad invented a method to describe a font using a mathematical “language” rather than just a set of dots. John Warnock, along with partner Chuck Geschke, left Xerox PARC to start Adobe Systems to commercialize this breakthrough in computer science. The key to Adobe’s Postscript technology was the ability to describe a font as an outline rather than a set of dots. The bezier curves that made up the outline could be scaled to any resolution and then filled with the dots on the printer so that all the edges looked smooth. Totally tubular!

Steve Jobs got wind of Postscript and went to Warnock and Geshke to convince them to adapt their technology to make a printer language that would work with Apple’s forthcoming LaserWriter. The Mac was revolutionary, in part, because you could see fonts displayed on the screen that looked like the fonts you could output on a printer. What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) was a huge selling point for the Mac and the reason for its early dominance in desktop publishing and graphic design.

Fonts and the Mac

Because Apple was involved with fonts and typography from the very beginning, the Mac has support for a number of different font formats as they have evolved over the last 25 years. Here are the major formats that are found on the Mac that you can expect to see on your own machine.

Type 1 Fonts

If fonts were people, Postscript Type 1 Fonts would be the old men that sit around on the porch and gripe about how things used to be back in the day. The original outline fonts, Type 1 fonts are printer fonts (outlines) which must be kept together with their corresponding screen fonts (bitmaps) in order to render the text on screen. Even though they date back to the 80′s, Type 1 fonts have survived to this day and are still present in the font library of many designers.

Because of the problems caused by separate screen and printer font files, Adobe released Adobe Type Manager as a utility to render the outline fonts on screen. This was largely a response to TrueType and was successful in making all the designers who had invested lots of money in collections of Type 1 fonts very happy. If you have Postscript Type 1 fonts around today, you will want to make sure that you keep them with their bitmap fonts.

Type 1 Fonts have the file type LWFN. This type ID came from “LaserWriter font.”

Bitmap Fonts

Bitmap fonts are really out of use in the operating system, but remain as a legacy item. Bitmaps are basically fonts that are rendered at a specific size to be displayed on screen. They are not outline fonts, but rather a grouping of dots or pixels. You should only see these in conjunction with Postscript Type 1 fonts.

Part of the reason that Bitmap fonts stuck around is that font faces are typically adjusted by the font designer at small point sizes so that the proportions look correct. Bitmaps were carefully designed for each point size to look right at different sizes. Adobe came up with “hints” and in Postscript fonts to make these small adjustments on the fly and similar techniques have been employed in more modern font formats. Thus the need for hand-tweaked point sizes has diminished over the years and bitmaps aren’t really needed.

TrueType

If Type 1 fonts are the old men on the porch, TrueType fonts are having a mid-life crisis as they realize that they never really reached their potential and are being pushed aside by the new kids coming up. Invented by Apple and brought to market in 1991 along with System 7 to try and break the stranglehold that Adobe had on the desktop publishing and laser printer markets, TrueType fonts integrate the concept of screen and printer fonts so you only have to manage one file, called a font suitcase, which contained both. The format became widely popular for cheap or free fonts but, despite the sophisticated kerning and ligature features of Quickdraw GX and Apple Advanced Typography, never really took off among designers who continued to prefer the typefaces available in Postscript format.

Apple licensed the TrueType technology to Microsoft, so TrueType fonts are supported in both the Mac and Windows operating systems. Unfortunately, the fonts are implemented differently on each platform, so you will see Mac and Windows versions of the same font family in the TrueType format. Today, new TrueType fonts would only be released in the Windows format since the Mac also supports that format.

Because TrueType was envisioned as an alternative to Postscript, a number of TrueType fonts were created in character-width compatible sets for popular Type 1 fonts like Helvetica, Times Roman, and Courier. The familiar TrueType fonts that correspond to the venerable Postscript fonts are Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New. One particularly frustrating aspect of font management is figuring out which fonts are simply replacements for the same typeface in a different format so that you can standardize your designers on the same font.

The Mac TrueType fonts have the type FFIL while Windows TrueType fonts appear as .ttf files. Leopard is moving towards the Windows format .ttf files as the standard (as is everyone else).

Dfont files are a special case of TrueType where the font data has been moved in the data fork to support some of OS X’s unix underpinnings. These are only used for system fonts and you should never need to mess around with them.

OpenType

OpenType was announced in 1996, but became available around 2000-2001. This technology was jointly developed by Microsoft and Adobe to add additional capabilities to fonts and resolve the lingering conflicts of managing both screen and printer fonts. In particular, OpenType supports unicode character sets and non-Roman scripts like Arabic, though word processing or page layout software has to be written to expose those features to the user. At this time, Adobe’s entire library of fonts have been converted to OpenType and every other major font foundry releases their work in OpenType as well.

Although Tiger showed considerable support for OpenType fonts, Leopard goes much further and also includes support for Arabic script OpenType fonts.

OpenType fonts are .otf files in OS X.

Suitcase Files

In the old days of System 7, suitcase files held both screen and printer variants for TrueType fonts. The name still survives in OS X as a file type, but the implementation of font files in OS X has completely changed.

System Fonts

Mac OS X requires several fonts in order to display the menu bar and other UI elements. Because of this, OS X will often not boot at all if fonts are missing. Because fonts are loaded at a low-level in the operating system, problems with fonts can cause system crashes or performance problems. Leopard introduced the new concept of protected system fonts that will be replaced automatically if they are removed from the system font library to prevent such problems. If you remove some fonts and see them magically reappear, OS X may be helping you out by replacing the system fonts it needs.

Microsoft Word Fonts

Microsoft Office for Mac, partly because of Microsoft’s history of developing font technologies for Windows and partly to make Office documents more portable between Windows and Mac versions, includes a number of fonts in a standard install on the Mac. Some of these fonts are duplicates of fonts included with OS X and some are required by Office to render the toolbars and other interface elements of Office applications. These fonts were originally welcomed because they were better than the system fonts, but now the Leopard system fonts have surpassed the Microsoft fonts. Office 2004 and Office 2008 install fonts into different locations, so be aware of that as you try to clean up your fonts on your system.

Adobe Creative Suite Fonts

Adobe Creative Suite installs a large number of fonts in Mac OS X. CS3 and later put these fonts in the system library, but CS2 and the original CS placed them in an Adobe directory. If you are using Creative Suite, then you certainly want a large font collection, but you will end up with duplicates between Apple-provided system fonts and Adobe fonts. One of the most common font problems I see is a designer that has multiple versions of Helvetica installed that eventually conflict with each or simply cause confusion when choosing the right font for a project.

Get a Handle on Your Fonts

Tomorrow I will cover five software programs that help you manage your fonts: Font Book, FontExplorer X and FontExplorer Pro, FontAgent Pro, Suitcase Fusion X, and FontCase. In addition, if you really want an in-depth understanding of how fonts work in Leopard, I highly recommend that you check out two e-books from TidBITS Publishing: Take Control of Fonts in Leopard and Take Control of Font Problems in Leopard. Sharon Zardetto, who has been writing about the Mac for over 20 years, has created a really valuable resource for designers and support professionals alike. Tiger versions are also available if you are still supporting 10.4 in your shop. These books cover font technologies in far greater depth than I have here, and also explain how to fix a myriad of problems that may crop up.

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