Spotlight is Skynet
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You don’t need 13,000 fonts to choose from. The Desktop Publishing era has created designers and people doing layout who are still tickled by all the cutesy and neat font variations that they can so easily use. Thankfully, the trend is now finally swinging back to the art of typesetting, where you need no more than a few dozen fonts at most, and type weight, flow, hanging quotes, etc. are being acknowledged as being elements of better typesetting. The New School is Old School, so to speak. Apps like InDesign give you so much power over the appearance of your type, especially if you are using Unicode fonts, that you don’t need 1,400 flavors of Helvetica-esque sans serif fonts, etc.
Yes, I can understand that if you are insistant on having access to thousands of fonts that would bog your computer down if they were sitting in your /Library/Fonts folder, you would still need to use Extensis.
The last version of Extensis I used didn’t have this feature, but maybe it does now: Phill, can you have Extensis run a report of how many of the bazillion fonts you have you’ve actually used in the last year? And with what frequency you use that set of fonts?
I take your point, but I work in an environment where I might receive artwork done by many different people, using a variety of fonts (that personnally I wouldn’t have picked)
I don’t have an excessive font collection, mostly just the Bitstream library (which does contain the odd cutesy font, but it is an internationally recognised font library used by millions the world over). I don’t mess around creating multiple suitcase sets, I just drop the entire font folder onto suitcase to create one big set (I think there are around 5000 fonts in there). With Suitcase X1 and its plug-ins for Quark, Illustrator and InDesign I can open any job and if I have the font on my machine, Suitcase will open it, without any input from me and the job will open correctly. No error messages, no hunting down missing fonts. Having a large suitcase database doesn’t slow down my mac one little bit, it’s not like the fonts are open all the time. I couldn’t tell you how often I’ve used any particular font, or frequency of any type of font, but that’s the beauty of Suitcase, I don’t need or want to know. It handles everything in the background wonderfully. Unlike FontBook.
Touché. It’s approaching two years since I worked in a design environment where clients would send me their files. When you can’t control the document from the ground up, you obviously can’t control what random font a client would use. At the very least, you’d need to see the font so you could remap it to your preferred Unicode version that was a close match.
“Thankfully, the trend is now finally swinging back to the art of typesetting, where you need no more than a few dozen fonts at most, and type weight, flow, hanging quotes, etc. are being acknowledged as being elements of better typesetting.”
Hanging quotes… ick. If you mean quotes that hang out in body text set in columns, this is NOT “better typesetting.” You’ll never see that in any publication that knows what good typesetting is all about. This is just an awfullly stupid trend that started because someone correctly noted that in certain settings punctuation (as well as certain letters like capital T’s) need to be hung outside the usual text frame. But never, ever, never, ever, ever in column format body text. Every time I see it, it makes me wince.
Um...if by “stupid trend” you mean “ancient time-tested typesetting technique used since the first printing plates were created”, then we agree.
Hanging punctuation has been used for centuries because your eye expects columnar text ligatures to align together. Your eye perceives a border where the text is, not where the ink is. The only reason it ever stopped being used was thanks to the advent of desktop publishing, which since 198x were incapable of producing this (and many other) eye-pleasing, time-tested parts of the art of typography.
"Basically, anyone still using Extensis Suitcase for their fonts would be a ninny to continue to do so.”
Until FontBook is able to comunicate with other applications and dynamically open fonts as they are needed without any intervention from the user, I’ll continue to be a ninny.
By Phill Watson on April 27, 2005 at 04:52am link