understanding font management

Intro

Font formats

Mac OS X font installation

Managing fonts

Licensing fonts

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Managing fonts

As your font collection grows you'll need to use software to help you manage it better. Although you can have hundreds of fonts installed at once in OS X without making the operating system start to struggle, you'll still end up with font menus as long as your arm. You can spend time moving fonts about by hand, but you'll find it easier to use a font management utility to turn fonts on and off for you.

Two commercial font tools worth considering are Extensis' Suitcase X1 and Alsoft's MasterJuggler. Both have been around for many years, and work in very similar ways. Fonts are normally kept in non-system folders somewhere out of the way and then turned on and off via the utility rather than by moving them around yourself. Useful features include creating custom lists of fonts for specific jobs or clients, plus auto-activation of fonts within certain applications when documents are opened.

Of course, things have changed a little with OS X 10.3. Apple's new Font Book utility provides basic but perfectly workable features for enabling and disabling fonts; this works using the simple process of moving fonts between the regular fonts folders and 'Fonts (disabled)' folders. It doesn't offer auto-activation, and the approach to font sets isn't as powerful as in Suitcase and Master Juggler, but it looks like a very useful ability regardless.

In a related advance, font installation will be even easier in OS X 10.3; double-clicking a font will show a useful type preview panel, plus the user will be able to install the font with a single click. If you don't use third-party font management tools this will help tremendously. Of course, if you do you get more features at your fingertips, with even more to come. Extensis has been keen to position Suitcase as clearly more highly-powered than Font Book, and is likely to come up with ways to accentuate this as soon as possible.