Extensis Suitcase Fusion
Platform: Mac OS X 10.3/4
Price: £65 plus VAT ; £37 plus VAT (upgrade from Suitcase X1 or Font Reserve 3)
Company: Extensis
Pros: Merger of the best parts of the popular Suitcase font manager with Font Reserve 3 stablemate. Offers easy font-finding through Font Vault, and smart plug-ins.
Cons: Slightly harder to use and learn than the Apple Font Book, but it’s more powerful too.
According to the company, this marries the user interface and ease of use of Suitcase with the back-end power of Font Reserve, and adds some more features. Morrison Software’s Font Doctor 7 is also included, to detect and repair corrupt fonts.
Existing Suitcase X1 users can transfer all fonts, sets, keywords, and styles automatically when they install Fusion. Font Reserve users get a font and metadata transfer utility. As before, Suitcase Fusion detects and displays all the fonts on your disks, after which you can gather them into sets, then switch them on or off as needed.
Fusion now uses the Font Vault – a central storage area where all fonts are copied, with the option to delete fonts from their original locations. They can be exported again by dragging onto the desktop.
If you have different fonts with the same name (as opposed to true duplicates), such as the many iterations of Times or Helvetica, Fusion’s Font Sense technology creates unique identifiers within its database. It also automatically separates the different faces within a font suitcase, so if you only need a bold face, that’s all it loads.
Font activation is completely automatic – if you open a document that requires fonts you don’t currently have open, Suitcase Fusion loads them automatically. Activation plug-ins are installed for QuarkXPress, InDesign, and Illustrator documents. Fusion gives extended tickbox options in the control panels for these plug-ins.
Fonts are activated using Font Sense information saved by the plug-ins. Suitcase X1 FontSync information can be read from older documents.
If there’s a choice of two or more fonts, you can either select the appropriate font yourself or set the plug-in’s preferences to make automatic choices for you.
The Fusion user interface is similar to Suitcase X1’s, but with more depth of information on display, such as editable foundry and class names. True PostScript names can be displayed, which is useful for troubleshooting.
Fusion is a useful advance on Suitcase X1. It’s easy enough to use, and the new version adds some powerful features. The upgrade price is good value, and definitely worth it.
Article by Simon Eccles, DIGIT magazine © IDG 2006