FontExplorer X: In-Depth Review
In the world of design one of your most important tools will always be your font management system. Without a reliable system in place your work will soon spin out of control with your projects looking non-uniform and resembling an alphabet soup. Well okay maybe not that bad but font management is actually quite important and not always entirely that straight forward.
Enter Linotype’s FontExplorer X – a robust and stable program for managing all your fonts, both system and user added. If the fact that it has been developed by Linotype, the world’s leader in fonts, doesn’t excite you, let’s take a look at some of its enterprise level features.
Cross platform support
Why use an amazing program on your Mac and not be able to use it on your PC? FontExplorer X recently completed its PC beta program, so almost all the amazing features you’re about to find out about will be there for you.
Intuitive iTunes-style interface
So you don’t think of iTunes as being at an “enterprise” level, but this quickly becomes an IT director’s dream. If a user can rock to the beat of their music collection, they can easily feel confident in having full control over the management of their fonts. Activating fonts is a simple click of a check box. Fonts can also be color coded so you can quickly find those fonts you just picked for your next brochure.
Much like playlists and smart playlists in iTunes, users can use their own custom sets with ease. With the smart set feature you can create an intelligent font set that is automatically created based on the criteria you specify. So you want a set that contains only OpenType fonts, Bold-faced and with a copy-write of 1998? Simply enter in those variables and FontExporer will create a font set based on what it can find in your current font library. My favorite use of this feature is a smart set that finds all activated fonts, this allows me to turn off all my fonts with a single click and bring me to the base system fonts for troubleshooting.
Unimaginably quick activation time
While testing this software in our lab we were able to open over 5,000+ fonts at one time in less than 3 minutes. This same operation tried with Extensis Suitcase X1 resulted in a spinning wheel that rendered our system useless until we forced quit out of Suitcase. Definitely not an acceptable action as now you’ve messed up your font cache and you now need to go reset over 70% of Suitcase’s preferences in order to restore proper font order.
In-depth font information and previews
FontExplorer provides the most detailed information about fonts that I have ever found in a font management system. A simple click on the desired font and a preview is displayed in the bottom window with details of the font’s official family, format, and user modifiable comments displayed clearly.
Double click on that same font and a robust information window is opened. The summary tab details just about everything you could ever want to know about a font including it’s Foundry, Trademark information, purchase location, version and copy-write information. A 5-star based rating system is included that allows designers to quickly pick their best fonts as they work. A click to the Characters tab provides you with a preview of the individual characters included in the font along with options for customizing the view. The detailed Preview tab allows you to sample your fonts in a variety of sizes and colors to find the perfect match you’ve always wanted.
Easily export fonts
When you’re finished with a project, you sometimes have the need to hand off the fonts to the printer or prepress house. FontExplorer gives you several options for copying out fonts. A simple drag and drop to your desktop can either copy the fonts directly to your desktop, put them in a disk image, or my personal favorite of placing them into a .zip archive. The benefit of the .zip archive is they’re already packaged and ready to email out. This same feature will also allow you to select a font’s preview text and drag it to your desktop, thus saving a .jpg image of the preview that’s perfect for sending out for approval from your client.
Auto-activation support
While some firms frown on that auto-activation of fonts for obvious purposes, FontExplorer gives you the option nonetheless. Currently they have plug-ins for all of the Adobe products as well as Quark.
Do you have an application that doesn’t fall under either of those two companies? No problem as again FontExplorer has you covered. In the preferences you can select which programs to intercept font requests from. Your CEO just sent you an InDesign document that he needs you to magically turn all nice and pretty for a presentation in an hour, of course he fails to provide you with the 25 fonts he used to create his masterpiece. Once you open the file, FontExplorer will prompt you to load the missing fonts and if they’re already in your library will attempt to load them automatically. Don’t like your fonts being opened for you? FontExplorer also allows you to select a text-based document and will scan it for fonts even without the editing applications installed on your computer.
Built-in font cache cleaning
This is almost a minor point, because in our testing and company-wide release of this software, the need for cleaning up corrupted font caches is a thing of the past. But if you ever get to that point, the program has an area for cleaning your application and system font caches with a simple click. If you allow FontExplorer to manage the actual font folder structure, you can also optimize and clean out unused fonts from this area.
Built-in Linotype store access
Think of it as an iTunes for your fonts. Not only does it keep your fonts all nice and tidy, it also allows you to purchase new fonts for your collection right through the software. Fonts are then added to your Library upon purchase.
Amazing software at an amazing price
So you’re ready to make the switch, you have your credit card ready and you really want to order. Unfortunately for your credit card company this software is 100% free. All you need to do is download it from the Linotype website and enjoy!
So with all those pros, are there any cons? Well if you just spent a ton of money on another solution you’ll feel really bad about that decision. The only thing we’ve really found that isn’t a huge concern is a lack of the ability to connect to a font server solution. But if you’re diligent about managing your fonts, a large company can get by without this feature. Also from time to time, we noticed that the cache cleaning’s didn’t always work, but we also haven’t had a need to clean them up since installing FontExplorer, so it’s a good trade off.
As always we love hearing any feedback you might have from using this software, so please don’t hesitate to contact us and let us know what you think.
I’ve never really used a font… app (is there a term for what they do?). What does this offer that the built in font book (I think it’s called) doesn’t?
Would I be right in guessing that this is mostly for business type users? In other words, if you don’t already know what you’d use it for, then you don’t need it… sort of thing.
Font management apps such as FontExplorer and Suitcase make it easy to add and remove fonts on the fly. With Font Book, any font you throw in there is activated, with management programs you can basically catalog all your fonts by creating different sets.
Say for instance you design business cards. Each company may use different fonts on their cards, you really don’t want all those fonts activated on your computer all the time. Programs like Font Explorer make it real easy turn turn fonts off and on without having to delete them. Overall it gives you more control over the entire font process.
It’s safe to say for most casual users who mainly surf the net and listen to music that fonts won’t really be a big issue. But if find yourself getting into design or type setting you’ll definitely want to look up a good program like this one.
For designers this is a MUST HAVE. Period. I have switched my whole design dept. to FontExplorer and haven’t heard a font complaint in months. What a relief!
This is a very stable app which is as easy (maybe easier) to use as iTunes. Gone are the days of crashing Suitcase and all the other hassles associated with it. Life got easier when this app came around. I really owe the programmers a beer or something…oh wait, that’s what the built in font store is for. Genius. The way a company should be run.
PS. Pete, I think you got the idea. Doesn’t sound like you need it. If you decide to play with fonts though (and there are plenty of free ones out there) this is a great tool for keeping them in order, activating them and getting a live preview to see how your design will look.
OSX comes with an app like this called FontBook but it really doesn’t have the power to deal with as many fonts as pro designers use. For instance if you tried to load the whole Adobe font collection in FontBook it would probably crash your system. With FontExplorer you can scroll through live previews of all the fonts in seconds.
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can someone with some connections holler at Linotype to get a damned stable Windows version for full release sometime this century? it would be greatly appreciated by the Windows design community.
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