Lab

Font Management Utilities

As every designer knows, you can't have too many fonts in your collection. Except, that is, when you're scrolling through long font menus searching for the right face. Then you need ways to cut through the dross, or at least the fonts you don't need at that time.

Font management utilities are the answer, and here we take a close look at five of the best, from some of the oldest products through to Apple's new Font Book utility, which is bundled with the latest versions of Mac OS X. Any one of these will help you keep your font menus under control by enabling and disabling fonts and font families, and help you know which ones you do and don't want through some form of font preview method.

Grouping fonts into custom sets for easy enabling and disabling of many faces in one go is another universal feature. You're left free to build up these font shopping lists according to your needs; by font style, by suitability for certain media, jobs or clients, by technical classification, foundry, or anything else that makes sense to you.

So far, this describes the free Font Book utility that Apple provides with OS X 10.3. But from here onwards the commercial tools start to come into their own, with tricks such as automatically enabling required fonts when opening documents in certain applications, helping manage collections in various ways, track down the perfect face, spot font families with missing parts, isolate and sometimes even repair damaged fonts, and more. These issues are tackled by MasterJuggler, Suitcase, FontAgent Pro and Font Reserve; basically every commercial utility we tested.

These days, you shouldn't assume you need to buy a font management tool, as Font Book may handle everything you need. On the other hand, spending a little on the right software could save you hours of time and effort. Over the following pages we put each utility to the test, figuring out which ones are right for different kinds of work. Of course, the decision is up to you, and it may well be based as much on whatever tool you use now as any other factor. However, don't let past experiences prejudice your conclusions unduly towards - or against - any particular package; read our reports, download and try the demos, and see which font management utility suits you best.