Linotype FontExplorer X
This is clever. Linotype, one of the world’s leading typeface foundries, has released a professional font management utility for Mac OS X — and it’s free. They’re going to make money by selling their own fonts through the app, iTunes-style. In fact, judging by the screenshots, the app itself looks rather iTunes-like. However, it’s iTunes 4.9 that it looks like, which means it already looks dated.
John Gruber – Daring Fireball Linked List
This looks very cool. Unfortunately, it starts out by asking me if I want FontExplorer to “manage fonts”. By “manage” it means in the iTunes sense where it stores all my fonts for me. It’s not entirely clear that it can still manage my fonts if they’re not “managed” by FontExplorer. Fortunately it can. They should probably pick a better word.
This combined with Mac OS X’s font panel and the Type Cast widget make me a very happy designer.
It’s iFonts! Neat-o!
Yeah, playing with it a little bit, it basically is exactly like iTunes and the iTunes Music Store, just for fonts.
Oh, and the cost of the items is $20-$40 instead of 99¢.
The ‘manage fonts’ option actually seems pretty nice (I keep a cloned copy of my system on an external Firewire drive to play with things I might wish to be able to undo later). It certainly keeps the memory usage down if you have a considerably large font library, and for every program I’ve toyed with thus far, handles the font requests reasonably well.
It does seem to have a little bit of a problem with Microsoft Word, as the ‘preview fonts in menu’ option forces FontExplorer X to load and cache every single font on my system ANYWAY…
Yeah, I’m kind of worried about the automatic font loading with Word… and Safari.
You can disable that functon.
Hello. Great app. Does anyone know how to make fonts activated after a restart like in suitcase?
The only additional feature that I would like to see implemented is the ability to rate fonts in a more efficient manner. The current right-click > my rating is a bit cumbersome. Where’s the inline drag n’ rate functionality?
I have just got this app. I think it is brilliant. I have had such a nightmare organising my fonts - this has made it a whole lot easier. If you are opening an old psd project, you don’t have to wait till the ‘missing font error’ comes up so you can find the right one and activete it - NO - it does it for you. SSSWWWWWEEEETTTT! I would like to thank them for doing such a good job. It is a pitty that the store is not myfonts.com - but hey.
Does anyone know how to make fonts activated after a restart like in suitcase?
[…] Every hardcore Mac Designer relies on Fonts. Font Book is one of the least stable applications in OSX, especially when you hit more then a hundred fonts or so which is easy to do when you’ve installed anything from Adobe. Linotype Fontexplorer does a good job managing fonts and activating the ones you need when you need them. […]