Suitcase (font manager)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article or section is written like an advertisement. Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view per Wikipedia policy. Mark blatant advertising for speedy deletion with {{db-spam}}. (help, talk) |
Suitcase is a font management program for Mac OS and Microsoft Windows. Many users of graphic design tools have so many fonts that they cannot keep them active at once in the system. A large number of active fonts may degrade application performance as well as make it difficult to find fonts.
The first version of Suitcase was developed for the Mac in 1987. [1]
Suitcase Fusion, released in January of 2006, merges two separate Macintosh font managers previously sold by Extensis. One of the font managers, Font Reserve, was previously sold by Diamondsoft before it was acquired by Extensis. Suitcase Fusion combines features of both products. It retains the interface of Suitcase X1 and adds to this Font Reserve's "Vault." The Vault is a centralized repository for fonts and font metadata. The benefit of the Vault is that it provides a single location for storing fonts. This eliminates problems caused when fonts are stored in diverse locations that may not always be available (e.g. external disks). One criticism of the Vault is that it stores fonts in a proprietary format. Other programs (e.g. Linotype Font Explorer) create a font library that keeps fonts in their standard format. Both Suitcase and Font Reserve users can import their databases into Suitcase Fusion.
The location of Suitcase Fusion's Vault is /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Extensis/Suitcase/Suitcase Font Database.suitcasevault. Note that a separate Vault is maintained for each user. For large font libraries this can be wasteful of disk space and requires that multiple libraries be managed on a single computer. Other font managers (e.g. Linotype Font Explorer) allow a single shared library.
If a user needs to move their fonts and settings to a new system, they can do so by moving the Vault file and placing it in the same relative location. It is recommended that users make a .zip archive of the Vault before transferring it between systems.
Another feature taken from Font Reserve is face level activation for Macintosh font suitcases. With most font managers, fonts are activated as a larger unit (typically the font family), which means that all of the variations packaged in a suitcase, turn on at once. This would commonly be the book, italic, bold and bold italic weights, but some families have many more variations. Face level activation makes font conflicts far less likely because only the needed parts of a suitcase can be activated.
Suitcase Fusion also features auto-activation plug-ins for popular design applications. Documents opened will automatically activate the fonts they need. If a user has more than one font with the same Postscript name, Suitcase uses an Extensis-developed technology called Font Sense to determine which font was used in the document. Currently plug-ins are provided for InDesign CS , InDesign CS2, Illustrator CS, Illustrator CS2, as well as English and Japanese versions of Quark 6 and 7.
If an application does not have a plug-in for auto-activation, Suitcase can still intercept it's font requests and activate the font. However, for applications without a plug-in, only the Postscript name of the font is used. This can be less precise if there is more than one font with the same Postscript name in the Suitcase database.
Suitcase Fusion works with all fonts that are compatible with a given operating system. On Macintosh systems, this includes PostScript Type 1, TrueType, and OpenType.
Suitcase Fusion is localized for English, French, German and Japanese.
Suitcase Fusion version 12.1.2 is compatible with both Intel and PowerPC Macs running MacOS 10.3.9 and later. Suitcase for Windows version 9.2.2 is compatible with Windows 2000 and XP.
