I’ve been supporting print designers using Macs since the days of System 8, well over 10 years, and font management has always been the most frequent problem I’ve been asked to resolve. For years we’ve fought the battles of missing fonts, corruption, truetype failures, and just plain too many fonts on the system. Load too many fonts (some 2,000 postscript fonts here at Creative Services), and your system will begin to drag. Even worse, when you tried to find a font in Quark or InDesign, you had to scroll through the hundreds of fonts in your list. So we have always used the best font management tools available so that we could easily load and unload our thousands of fonts.

Back in the day of OS 8, Adobe Type Manager was required, and it was and remained a dog. We loaded and unloaded fonts manually, that is, we put them in the system font folder, rebooted, and then reversed the process once done using them. It was easy to miss something, and often designers would just keep activating fonts without ever removing any, and this would clog their system performance.

When Apple moved to OS X, the problems multiplied, as there were now 4 different font folders, and Murphy’s Law set in. Font Book, which comes with OS X, works, sort of, but it is not a professional level tool. Font management programs have several advantages, including previews of your font collection, folder organization and activation, automatic loading and unloading of fonts, and resolution of duplicates.

We used two of the leading products, Suitcase and FontAgent Pro, but when it came time to upgrade a couple of years ago, I looked around once again, and to my surprise found the best of the lot was the new Font Explorer X from Linotype, and it was free! When I first opened it, I thought I had opened ITunes by mistake; the interface is very similar, including a Linotype store where you can buy and download fonts.

Linotype is one of the oldest European font houses, with many famous font designers including Hermann Zapf, Adrian Frutiger, and Akira Kobayashi. I could understand that they could make such a great product and give it away (Suitcase/FontAgent are $100), as they were able to get you to their store. The prices are the same as Adobe, but much easier to preview and buy. Besides, many of the fonts we use are Linotype originals, and licensed by Adobe for sale.

Font Explorer X is still the best tool, IMHO, and there are two commercial versions available, workstation and server. However Linotype still offer Version 1.2.3 which is a free download available at http://www.fontexplorerx.com/download/, and at that price, it’s the best deal out there. Snow Leopard is said to improve font management within the OS, with unlimited fonts allowed (without system degradation) and auto-activation, two major steps in the right direction. In fact, if things go right, we may not have to buy any font management software in the future, Font Explorer X Version 1.2.3 will bridge our needs till after upgrade to Snow Leopard.

Here is a link to a review of font management tools written last fall, (I think it is still valid):
Font Manager Review

Not really. Our shop is about half Mac and half Windows workstations, and we have had to learn to work together. Although the corporate giants have often made it difficult to work in a mixed environment (including our numerous webservers, which run UNIX), we have found ways to work with all three platforms.

All of our designers use Mac Pro’s running Adobe Suite, including Acrobat, which has become an indespensible proofing tool. We’ve moved from Quark to InDesign for print layout, and for Web development we add Macromedia Studio 8. It will be interesting to see what Adobe comes out with with the release of CS3. Adobe just bought Macromedia and is saying that this is the biggest software release in the history of the company.

Our programmers tend to use Dell Windows machines, as do most of our editors and support staff. Windows is necessary for working with IU financial systems; Macs just do not work.

Windows machines require more attention to security threats, but updates and virus checks are run automatically, and our main threat vectors have been social engineering attacks such as the I Love You virus and the more recent Credit Union and Paypal phishing scams. We will not be moving to Vista anytime soon. For one thing, most of our machines, which are run on a three-year replacement cycle, would not run it well (we could run without Aero, the new graphic interface, but then the only advantage would be security, and XP is to be supported for another five years.) So although new machines will be “Vista ready,” it may be a while before we are all using it (hopefully after the first service pack is released).

On the Mac side we have different concerns. Macs are more like a sports car than station wagons (that’s Windows, you know, you’ve seen the commercials.) They are more finely tuned and run more complex programs, usually all at once. They are run hard and put to bed wet, but just keep on ticking. Font conflicts often cause print jobs to go wrong, so here is a shout-out to Linotype Font Explorer X: you rock! Free, fully supported software from a font giant that works like ITunes, it is the best font software I have ever used.

Recently we have been having some workflow problems within the Web team, as Dreamweaver does not interact well with itself on different platforms; files get locked and users get frustrated. We have pretty much fixed this problem by having our designers log into our OS X server using SMB only; then the confict does not occur. Our programmers use Windows as the main platform with a Mac Mini to do compatibility testing, but as we are still having some issues, this may reverse, with everyone on the Web team (except the editors) using Macs as their primary workstation.

On the server side we have one OS X Server with X RAID, which serves files for Creative Services, and three Windows servers, one with a large RAID array for backup of all of VPUR, one to serve files for our cousins in Media Relations and Marketing, and one to run our test Web server. All but the Web server are in our rack in Poplars, which will soon move to a real server room in the Von Lee.

Bottom line: Although Windows machines are more vulnerable and perhaps XP is now boring, they do the job, and with auto-updates, are stable and useful. Macs are much more elegant and full featured, built for the heavy lifting required by designers and programmers, but they can be touchy and still require some fine-tuning and upkeep. Are Windows/Macs worth the trouble/extra expense? Ask any user!