Thank you for being a loyal Suitcase Fusion customer! Suitcase Fusion is about to move to the cloud and become Connect Fonts Powered By Suitcase. What does this mean for you?
+ Your current subscription will include Connect Fonts - no additional cost + Connect Fonts will offer all the benefits of Suitcase Fusion + Find fonts fast and easily with intuitive search + Automated font pairing suggestions + And much more!
The future of fonts is mobile, flexible, and it belongs to those who can adapt to anything (thatās you!) And because youāre a loyal Suitcase Fusion customer, that means you can purchase additional licenses of Connect Fonts at your current Suitcase Fusion price.
Watch for our official Connect Fonts announcement, coming soon!
Creatively yours, Extensis
Will it be just another Adobe Creative Cloud fonts? Time to update Font Explorer X? Thoughts?
My first response was, āSuitcase still exists?ā
And after looking at both of the products you mentioned (and both of which Iāve used in the past), Iām thinking that $86 a year for a font manager seems pretty mammoth, though it might make sense in a professional environment. But, they also seem pretty hardcore about the subscription (it will work until your year is up, and if you donāt renew, you have āup toā 14 days to retrieve your fonts from the cloudā¦), and this sounds like a way to shore up their subscription base.
Font Explorer X still offers a static license at a more reasonable fee, but they have Monotype behind them, which seems like a more stable base in my mind.
As an Art Director by trade, a font manager is a must (I only wish Apple would allow us to clean out 99% of the crap fonts they load). I have licenses for both Suitcase and Font Explorer X to cover multiple Macs. Iāve used Suitcase for about 30 years or so. Their shift to a subscription model a couple of years ago pushed me to Font Explorer X for a few of my Macs. Iāll see what this entails, but Iāll most likely shift everything to FEX. Not everything has to be in the cloud.
Same here, except there was a very interesting discussion about font management here not long ago.
Steve Jobs developed a system level solution that solved the need to manage both PostScript and TrueType fonts. Font Book is sitting on your Macās hard drive and is waiting to make font management easier for you:
Once you open it up and get started, you should also be able to open a font file in Font Book just by clicking on it.
Font Book exists because back around the year 2000, Adobe had turned its back on Macs and announced they would no longer update or develop any of their apps for Macs. Extensis, Suitcaseās developer, announced they would do the same. So itās been hasta la vista for Adobe Font Manager as well as Suitcase for Mac users. And itās so much easier to manage all your fonts, PS or TT, all in one place, not to mention that you donāt have to pay for it or for any upgrades.
Yes, and thatās why Iām surprised to hear that Suitcase is still around in any form.
I still have 800K disks with purchased Adobe fonts from the late 1980s, bundled with copies of Adobe Type Manager (ATM). Some of those fonts have followed me all the way from my Macintosh SE with its 20MB internal hard drive to my current iMac.
Suitcase was part of my workflow on that machine under OS 7, and the Quadra that finally replaced it. My recollection is that it did not āleapā very well from Classic Mac to OS X, and Font Book was a very welcome replacement when it arrived.
I truly loved being liberated from worrying about Type 1, Type 3, Multiple Masters, TrueType, and OpenType concerns.
My current wish is for a way to make all the fonts that are ālocked onā by the System (I presume for localization purposes) optionally visible or hidden in user applications.
I was using Suitcase Fusion on Mojave and recently updated my system to Monterey. I went over to the Extensis website to see if I needed an upgrade and thatās when I discovered they went subscription.
Despite Font Book being free, I have never used it, and wanted an app like Suitcase that I felt gave me more control over fonts, so I am now using Typeface Pro. It was $35.99 and for that you get 12 months of feature releases. And as their site says: āNo subscriptionā āYours foreverā. I wonāt be here forever, but I hope to get my moneyās worth until then .
Font Book doesnāt auto-load typefaces based on the file I open. Yes, it can create sets, which I have for every client. Itās not in the same league. The cost is less than an hourās pay rate per year, not an issue. I just want stable software that does its job. Eventually, all software bloats too far and becomes a liability. Weāll see if Suitcase crossed the line when we get more details.
Same here, I donāt think weāve used it since OS9. In those days it was almost necessary to manage various fonts for various jobs because people supplied us original Quark files on a Syquest/PLI drive. It was more a limitation of the OS - when the āthree finger saluteā was required multiple times a day because Quark would crash or the system would run out of memory or an extension would crash.
Ah the memories; ATM, Suitcase, screen fonts, printer fonts, Quark, Syquest, Zip drives, Jazz drives, rebuilding the desktopā¦
Although I donāt havenāt had a version of Suitcase or ATM on my ancient MacBook Pro, one of the big reasons why I prefer Font Book is speed, in addition to ease of use. I also like that it lives on my hard drive and not in the cloud. Though Iām currently retired, I spent decades working in publishing and advertising, and IIRC, Adobe stopped developing the stand alone ATM app and moved font management into the more profitable recurring revenue and cloud based Typekit, which of course works beautifully among all Adobe apps. Font Book and Typekit seem to have a lock on the market.
OMGā¦the bad old days of having to crawl under your desk multiple times a day for a hard rebootā¦THE HORROR! THE HORROR! What a difference OS X made!
Which reminds me of one of the other reasons for having Suitcase: client-supplied fonts, which sometimes would come along with jobs and could only be used for that job per the license and then had to be deactivated again. All of this happening prior to a glut of free fonts, freely available on the Internet; some of them with a few glyphs altered and a similar name to their source.
I wrote off Suitcase due to subscriptions; although, I fear one day that may no longer be a tenable position. Not happy with the others though.
Iām evaluating FontAgentPro, because FontExplorerX has been gas-lighting me about it being āUniversal.ā If they had just said it works fine in Rosetta 2, weāre working on M1/Universal, Iād be fine. But they insist it is āUniversalā and have me repeatedly delete it, re-download it, even sent me a 10-year-old Uninstaller (that they warned would wipe my whole configuration (only ~6K fonts), then a new link to download from. All of the *.dmgās were byte-identical according to cmp. Info says āIntelā not āUniversalā and it wonāt run w/o Rosetta 2.
I crashed FontAgentPro just importing too many fonts at onceā¦ ;~}
I urge all to try out FontBase. https://fontba.se/ As a support pro in the graphics industry I have used a lot of font solutions. This is the best just now. Free version has most of what you want.
.