Product Reviews

Extensis is well known for its Suitcase font management utility, one of the best-known font tools. The company also acquired Font Reserve, a powerful alternative font management tool that was, like Suitcase itself, also available in server form to help manage fonts across networks rather than just on individual machines. The new Universal Type Server is the fruit of this acquisition, plus a lot of additional development work, of course.

It's aimed at those who need to control font use across multiple machines; for example, in editorial, design and production teams in busy design and publishing organisations. It shifts the bulk of the font management work from individual users to a single server (which can be any networked Mac or PC), and manages font use in a library-like process using client software and server logins. The server software is surprisingly elegant and simple, once you've wrapped your head around how to get it set up, and the Universal Type Client software feels like a streamlined form of the regular Suitcase utility.

Fonts are added from the client application, which gives you access to a certain workgroup, as set up on the Universal Type Server. Getting to this point can be somewhat frustrating, not least because the setup information is spread across multiple PDFs. Fortunately, this is largely an issue for whoever will control the server software, so it won't affect users once they're up and running.

Once fonts have been added, you can browse the fonts you're allowed to see, search and sort by details such as font classification (this in particular being drawn from an exhaustive internal database), view samples, activate permanently or temporarily, and do everything else you'd expect from the

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normal Suitcase utility.

One critical issue with managing and enabling fonts is being able to recognise different fonts and font families. Font names aren't always enough, and other single identifiers may not be either. Extensis has included something that it calls Font Sense, which tells fonts apart by calculating a kind of fingerprint ID from many different aspects of each typeface. This should eliminate font conflicts and mismatches.

One point that everyone should remember with Universal Type Server and the associated client is that users require a connection with the server to be able to interact with the font library - although depending on the user's setup they may then be able to work offline with fonts they've enabled. This involves careful planning of the users, workgroups and permissions, so taking time with the planning is a very good move.

Pricing is also something that you'll need to think about carefully. Universal Type Server comes in Lite and Professional forms, with the Lite version allowing up to 10 concurrent connections and the Professional version having no limit on simultaneous active connections, plus a higher level of technical support and free updates. Lite users can have larger numbers of users with the client software in use, but only 10 people can be logged onto the server at once, and this can't be extended later on. This costs £1885 and includes the 10-connection serial number. The Professional version costs £1222, but doesn't include any client access; this is added at a cost of £110 per simultaneous client connection for up to 49 connections, £92 for up to 149 connections, and so on. Go ahead and read this paragraph again, it isn't the simplest of pricing models.

Even without the pricing questions, Universal Type Server is clearly not suitable for everyone. It is possible to set up the client software to approximate the way the standalone Suitcase utility works, but it really is at heart the client side of a clientserver team.

If you don't need to manage your fonts tightly across a network, then Universal Type Server is going to over-complicate your life. Having said that, if you really do need a centralised, server-based approach for management of typefaces, then Universal Type Server is a robust and comprehensive solution.