![]() ![]() Suitcase Fusion still lets you handle fonts that are controlled by the operating system so you can activate or deactivate them if a font conflict occurs. It was not so much a bad feature as it was a powerful one that shouldn’t be taken lightly. One of the most powerful features of earlier versions of Suitcase, and one which I was loathe to touch for fear of bollixing up my workflow, was the Manage System Fonts control. And finally, the Font Vault automatically separates fonts into their separate faces, organizing them on-the-fly, as it were. The Vault also ensures that any fonts deemed corrupt or at the very least problematic are not allowed entry. Suitcase Fusion will not allow true duplicate fonts into the Vault. One of the great advantages of employing the Font Vault is the vault’s strict organizational structure. As long as they’re in a font set, Fusion will know where to find them. You can choose to either copy your fonts to the Vault, hence giving you more control over them, or just leave them where they are. Suitcase Fusion’s interface is a natural next step in the evolution of font management: Simple, powerful, and easy to understand (Figure 1).įigure 3. Suitcase users will appreciate that the familiar one-window browser interface hasn’t changed much since the previous version, Suitcase X1. Suitcase Fusion keeps some of the best features of its namesake predecessor and still finds room for some, though not all, of the best features of Font Reserve. Extensis expects to deliver the Universal version of Suitcase Fusion in the first half of this year. The $99 Suitcase Fusion ($50 upgrade from Suitcase X1 or Font Reserve 3) is Mac-only software, but it is not yet a Universal application and therefore doesn’t run natively on the new Intel-based Macintosh models. The big question about the merger was, “Will it work?” Now that I’ve tested Suitcase Fusion, I can answer the question with a relieved, “Yes.” Veteran Font Reserve users (I’ll call them Font Reservists) may miss aspects of their old font manager, but Suitcase Fusion is as fast if not faster than earlier versions, and it’s added features that creative professionals - even Font Reservists - will appreciate. It’s taken Extensis almost three years to merge the two into one, called Suitcase Fusion. Once competitors with very different approaches to font management, they became uneasy roommates when Extensis acquired Font Reserve in 2003. You might call Extensis Suitcase and DiamondSoft Font Reserve the Odd Fellows of the software world. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |