By: Erik Vlietinck
Tue, November 13, 2007 - 7:10:01

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Font Book has long been Mac OS X’s least attractive application. It made a market for third party developers such as Extensis and Insider Software. Even Linotype released its own excellent font organiser and offers it for free. But Leopard’s Font Book is no longer the weakest link in the font management chain. It has been updated with features such as Auto-Activation. Throw away those third-party font organisers!

If you need powerful management outside the Leopard system Libraries, you won’t find Font Book a good replacement for your copy of Suitcase or FontAgent. Active fonts still live in one of the Libraries on your Leopard system, wen using Font Book. But the good news is that you can turn these fonts on and off as required.

Inactive fonts are not kept inside any library at all. They just sit idle in your fonts folder, ready to be used whenever you’re ready. With only active fonts being dumped into the Fonts folder inside the Library folder, you do have to keep your fonts folder somewhere on your system. As soon as you remove the fonts from the system, Font Book won’t be able to find them.

Font Auto-Activation

It will, however, keep the references to them so that, whenever the folder is restored, the fonts and your preferences related to them are restored as well. Font Book now has a great preview panel, where you can see the font preview, but also the metadata pertaining to each font. And you can validate fonts, and throw out duplicates.

I found the validation feature to be the least stable, making Font Book crash on occasion. But after a crash Font Book launched with all my changes applied, so there must be some auto-save functionality built-in. Auto-activation seems to work with all the applications that can make good use of it, including QuarkXPess and InDesign.

Fonts can be exported, multiple libraries and collections can be created, and font collections or individual fonts can be set on or off. Printing fonts can be done in catalogue, waterfall or repertoire format, with or without font information on the page.

So, does Font Book face up to the competition with Extensis Suitcase Fusion or one of the other professional font managers? Well, it depends. On an individual user level, I would say you don’t need a third-party font manager anymore. Wen you’re working in a design department, where fonts are often kept on servers, it’s a whole different story. 

And when you need “collect for output” capabilities for a layout document with automatic save from within the font manager, chances are that you will prefer to stick with Extensis’, Linotype’s or Insider’s tool anyway.