How many fonts are there on your system? On mine, there are some 800, of which only some twenty complete font families. I haven’t purchased those fonts, with the exception of a few. They all came with an Adobe installation, or as a bonus with some design application. You might think those fonts therefore don’t have value and it’s allowed to copy them around at will. You couldn’t be more wrong. Fonts are protected by full software licenses. In fact, Digital Rights Management may apply to them.

If I --an individual user-- have 800 fonts on my system, collected over the years, how many fonts do you imagine live on the combined systems of a small to medium-sized design firm? And how many on global advertising firms? Tens of thousands, I should think. All scattered on many different desktop machines run by many different designers. How can a manager make sure nobody is using illegal fonts and therefore exposing the company to legal actions? By delivering fonts from one central database: a font server.

Font servers do more than just ensure licenses are respected. They also enable centralised management, role-based access, easy access to fonts when travelling and cost-savings as less licenses are needed if the access rights are well implemented.

The best of Font Reserve and Suitcase server for a fraction of the cost

Extensis only recently released Universal Type Server, a relatively inexpensive new font server that combines the best from Suitcase Server and Font Reserve server technologies. Universal Type Server also uses a new licensing scheme --one that is destined to cost less than the previous servers, because clients can be added on a concurrent user basis. And Extensis goes the extra mile by offering the new server for free to current customers of a service agreement.

The server component of Universal Type Server is Java-based technology that you manage through a web browser interface. I first installed the server on an old Power Mac G4 dual 450 MHz with Leopard server installed. Although that machine is not certified to run most any server technology, Universal Type Server ran just fine. It was a bit slower than on the Power Mac G5 dual 1.8 GHz I normally use, but it could stand the test of usability and performance.

Of course the server runs better on its minimum required system, which is a Power Mac G5. Its performance is comfortable on that platform. Management is done through a number of easy to understand tabs and windows. Managing the server itself doesn’t involve much more than setting the server to auto-start or not, set the backup schedules, and see the status. The real management power is delivered via the Users and Workgroups interface.

The Users and Workgroups interface of Universal Type Server is accessed through the browser as well --it’s just a different port. If you want to make it easy on yourself, you just call up the Users and Workgroups interface from within the Client application. The Client has a menu item to that effect which becomes available when you’re logged in as administrator.

Users and Workgroup Settings support granular access control

The Users and Workgroups interface is where an admin will do most of the hard work. The screencast shows you the interface, which I think is very clean and easy to use. The level of control over who can do what to and with fonts is nice and granular. It allows administrators of even the most complicated environments to set permissions based on roles, individual user and workgroup levels. The permissions themselves cover everything you can possibly do with a font.

The Client applications are installed on the users’ workstations and they give access to each user, to what he or she can do --as allowed in the Users and Workgroups interface. The Client also serves to import fonts, collect them for output (if allowed), and see what they look like. On an individual basis, some users can be given the permission to play with fonts without actually using them --a sort of sandbox functionality which designers will like.

The Client doesn’t look like Suitcase Fusion. Instead, it has a distinctly cleaner look with some features of its own. Users can create Smart sets --saved searches with multiple criteria are possible-- and can see how glyphs and ligatures look like in a specific font. The only thing the Client won’t do --for obvious reasons-- is manage your system fonts for you.

System fonts are listed, but they remain in their default locations at all times.

Universal Type Server finally comes with plug-ins for the three designer applications: InDesign, Illustrator and QuarkXPress.

The hardest part about setting up Universal Type Server is the planning phase. Your Users, Roles and Workgroups must be carefully planned in order to get the most out of the server and the workflow you can set up with it.