Now, for all my historical unhappiness on Windows font management, there have been some recent improvements:ġ) Extensis recently released a much-updated version of Suitcase for Windows (11), which offers several cool new features, even if it does lag way behind its Mac sibling. Plus, having a viable Windows product will influence those Mac purchasers who want to be able to run the “same” thing on both platforms. In other words, if you’re playing in the Mac font management market, there’s probably a viable Windows market as well, even if it’s not quite as big. Based on trends in font sales and other data, I suspect that number has slid to something a lot closer to 65%. Back in the mid 90s, perhaps 80% of the market for font management was on Mac OS.
But it is a minority of all users who have thousands of fonts, making them really need font management, and more of those particular users are on the Mac.
FONTAGENT PRO 4.1 FOR MAC SOFTWARE
Why is that? Don’t expect some Mac-superiority argument here (and in contrast to my usual policy of accepting almost all comments, flames on this topic or anything that looks likely to ignite a platform war will not be posted).īut it is true that the DTP revolution started on the Mac OS, and that even today the majority of the high end of the publishing market is Mac based – which is interesting considering that Adobe sells more units of software on Windows, and has for a while. So user interface (and usability) and features have lagged far behind the same applications’ Mac counterparts. We’d all release Windows versions of our applications with the same name, but not the same feature set, and usually a much much worse user interface. This held true even for Adobe’s own ATM Deluxe, and for major applications such as Suitcase and Font Reserve. Even when it’s supposedly the “same” application on both platforms. How has Windows font management sucked? Well, the number one issue has been that for whatever reasons, Windows font management applications have not had feature parity with their Mac brethren. (OS X even has a lightweight font management capability with a built-in utility called Font Book – which is nice for average to middleweight users, but most publishing professionals still need something more heavy-duty.)
If you have thousands of fonts it’s pretty much essential, in my opinion. Here’s a brief rant on what font management is, how it has fallen down on Windows, some speculation on why, comments on recent improvements, and a batch of specific feature requests.įirst, what is font management? A font management application allows you to preview fonts without having them active on your system, create groups of fonts, search your fonts by various criteria, and activate/deactivate individual fonts, families or user-defined groups on the fly.
How, why, and can it be improved? Recent developments offer some hope for the future. Historically, Windows font management has well, sucked. I recently moved to a new laptop, which reminded me of a painful issue as I migrated my data and fonts and reinstalled my applications.
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