By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in utilities on May 18, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Why is it that when you are walking home from a night out, all the buses seem to have disappeared, especially if it’s pouring with rain and you can’t find a cab. Get within 100 yards of home, three double-deckers will drive past, bonded together like an Aussie road train.
Years gone by as a student, driving double-deckers was a part-time job. Just such a night saw me at the wheel of a fully-laden Daimler on the 5 route going north along the A23. Turning right at the mini roundabout into Carden Avenue, the power-steering packed-up. The only option was to stand up and heave on the steering wheel to get the 10 tons of bus round. Otherwise, we would have crashed through the garden wall, which anyone who knows the area will tell you is high and robust. Installing Suitcase Fusion 2 has left us with exactly the opposite feeling.
After blogging about FontExplorer last week, Extensis gave us a copy of Suitcase Fusion 2 and the latest FontDoctor to play with. Very nice, thank-you. Like MPs and Lords, we are open to bribes but our accounts are complete with receipts and audited by an accountant every year. As long-term Suitcase users we couldn’t wait to uninstall FontExplorer and get back into a comfort zone even though Tobias Meyerhoff, Linotype’s project manager, called from Germany to help sort out our problems with FontExplorer Pro. Both he and Jim Kidwell from Extensis, are vying to be the most helpful on a forum at MacWorld, here.
Packing your Suitcase
Installation was a little awkward, involving the entry of a long serial number (which thankfully, copied and pasted) but then the installer asks for name and password three times in rapid succession. Dial them in…click, dial them in…click, dial them in…click. All in the space of a nanosecond or two.
FontExplorer’s installation uses a registration document: select the file from within FontExplorer instead of typing in 16 digit serial numbers. Quark and Adobe could learn a thing or two from this.
Suitcase Fusion 2 found and imported the font vault which had been generated by Suitcase Fusion 1. It had no concerns about the fonts FontExplorer rejected. Similarly, Suitcase installed plug-ins for the applications for which it can open fonts automatically, as well as making a list of other programs it can work with such as Mail, Safari, Dictionary and TextEdit. There are pros and cons to this and FontExplorer has a few more options in its similar Font Request preferences. It is odd getting messages from Mail that it wants to open Warnock or some such font.
When installing FontExplorer Pro a few days earlier, it could only find one copy of QuarkXPress 8 and inDesign CS2. Tobias explained that it looks for the disk with the most up-to-date system. At that time we had 6 active hard drives containing various copies of 10.5.6, 10.5.7 and 10.6, the latter being the only one FontExplorer recognised. FontExplorer’s Preferences will let you choose other copies of programs to install plug-ins for whereas Suitcase Fusion 2 seems to bung them in everywhere.
Suitcase Fusion runs as a daemon, which means the program itself does not need to be active all the time, fonts will still auto-activate. Along with the daemon is a Control Panel in the Mac’s general System Preferences.
We find Suitcase’s interface a little cartoonish but friendly enough. A bit like Mac OSX beta with its large blobby buttons, and slightly confusing as tools are scattered around the main window. The user-interface in FontExplorer Pro may be less colourful but it is easier to understand and use.
As for features, both FontExplorer Pro and Suitcase Fusion 2 match each other, with Suitcase possibly winning with its much-vaunted, tear-off font sample windows which can hover on-screen over document pages. This is to demonstrate what the chosen typeface will look like, in-situ. A bit of a gimmick which might suit some.
Alternatively, FontExplorer has better search functions and more information about each typeface. For example: NewJohnston can be found in FontExplorer by searching for the name whereas Suitcase only knows it as NJ, nowhere is it listed as NewJohnston. This is quite a serious omission in our opinion.
Which is best?
We have problems with both. FontExplorer’s are limited to its rejection of some fonts which Suitcase and FontDoctor are happy to accept. This is arguably a good thing so that FontExplorer doesn’t activate damaged fonts.
Suitcase, on the other hand, can run incredibly slowly which we thought may be a problem with our typefaces. We would love to get a whole new library fresh from the foundry so that we could abandon our decades-old fonts but that is as unlikely to happen as MPs are to repay all the expenses they have fiddled… err… claimed over the years. Unless Adobe, Linotype or Extensis suddenly become extremely generous towards us – with typefaces that is, not MPs repayments.
To test Suitcase Fusion against Linotype FontExplorer we opened the same documents using both programs in succession. All the files had been made while running Suitcase Fusion 1 and saved with the Extensis Font Sense identification details built-in, which Suitcase Fusion 2 is supposed to recognise. Except that it didn’t.
These are mainly illustrated books containing a maximum of three or four typefaces and half a dozen fonts, using the same typeface library as Suitcase Fusion 1. When they opened while running Suitcase Fusion 2, many fonts were missing or only the cyrillic versions activated, which are not in the documents. FontExplorer, on the other hand, opened them immediately with all the correct typefaces.
Current work, saved last week with Suitcase Fusion 1, opened incredibly slowly when running Suitcase Fusion 2 and even hung QuarkXPress 8. Activity Manager shows QuarkXPress using 100% CPU as it opens the documents. Even saving them is a very slow process and reopening equally as slow. Switch back to FontExplorer Pro and the documents opened immediately.
This is on a quad core, twin processor Mac with 6GB RAM so it’s not a horse power problem. We checked the drives, repaired permissions, emptied caches, rebooted, looked for clashes. All the usual maintenance tasks. Even importing FontExplorer’s library into Suitcase had no effect.
Then we Googled for a solution. It took about two hours to find the right question to ask. Tucked away in a Quark forum is a recent post about documents opening slowly when Suitcase Fusion 2 is running because Suitcase checks every object in the document for fonts. The solution is to turn off the plug-in preference to activate fonts in embedded objects. Once done, documents open as fast as an MP changes their designated second home.
Until we found the plug-in ‘bug’ we had given up with Suitcase Fusion 2 and ran gratefully back to FontExplorer. Suitcase has a huge problem yet we could find nothing about it in the manual, just a paragraph explaining about scanning graphics and how only Adobe Illustrator EPS files are saved with Font Sense metadata.
Taking this ‘bug’ into account and that Suitcase Fusion 2 cannot open fonts in early versions of QuarkXPress and Adobe’s CS suites it is almost the clincher for us because we have to work in them from time to time. We are running with Suitcase Fusion 2 for the time being because it would be churlish not to.
FontExplorer Pro gives us an enormous feeling of security that we can always fall back to it and will have to the next time we need inDesign 2 or QuarkXPress 6.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
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