Font Book vs. Suitcase

Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Can any of you guys tell me the differences between Font Book, which ships with Mac OS X, and Extensis Suitcase?



Someone told me that whilst Suitcase loads and unloads fonts, Font Book loads all your fonts and merely hides the fonts you 'disable' from the OS and the apps.



This would mean that if you have a large collection of fonts, and you use Font Book, they're all going to be sitting in the background in some form, gobbling up resources.



The reason I ask, is that I'm a great believer in using the applications that come with the OS over third party offerings. I've seen Suitcase cause an awful lot of problems over the years, and if Font Book works in a similar way - i.e. it does just hide some of your fonts - then I'll choose Font Book and be done with Suitcase once and for all!



Cheers for your thoughs, guys!

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 9
    yamayama Posts: 427member
    One difference is that Suitcase is known to cause major problems with Adobe apps - particularly Illustrator and InDesign.



    A quick search through Adobe's knowledge base and you see that Suitcase can play havoc with the font caching Adobe uses for their apps. You could argue that this is partially Adobe's fault for putting their fonts in a separate directory which only Adobe apps use and using their own system for caching the fonts.
  • Reply 2 of 9
    messiahmessiah Posts: 1,689member
    Interesting.
  • Reply 3 of 9
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Messiah View Post


    Interesting.



    Take a look at Linotype's Font Explorer.



    It seems to do a pretty good job and its free.
  • Reply 4 of 9
    Dude, Font book does the trick for me... it can turn on or off fonts as you need them, plain and simple.
  • Reply 5 of 9
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by hypoluxa View Post


    Dude, Font book does the trick for me... it can turn on or off fonts as you need them, plain and simple.



    tends to be sluggish and installing lots of fonts at a time and going through them all can be arduous. Suitcase is much faster and resposive.
  • Reply 6 of 9
    Suitcase over Font Book



    Suitcase lets you use a collection of fonts without copying them to the Library Folder.
  • Reply 7 of 9
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by donebylee View Post


    Take a look at Linotype's Font Explorer.



    It seems to do a pretty good job and its free.



    Seconded. I have over 2300 fonts on tap (all legal, most are Adobe OT Library) and Font Book will NOT cut it for managing more than a few hundred fonts. It will slow your system down considerably. You need a professional grade software management system such as Suitcase or Font Explorer. I've used both extensively and honestly, i prefer Font Explorer. Not only is it free but it is quality software. It handles thousands of fonts effortlessly, has great previewing capabilities and is structured much like suitcase. Don't get me wrong, suitcase is great and if you are in a business environment and need to attach to a font server, Suitcase Font Server is one of the best solutions.



    Font Explorer also has some pretty decent Auto Activation plugins for Illustrator, Quark, and Indesign that have worked well for me.
  • Reply 8 of 9
    I swtiched from Suitcase to Font Explorer, damn that's nice...
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