ATM vs. Suitcase vs. Font Book

[willisnr]

I have used both ATM Deluxe and Suitcase and have found both to be of advantage in certain situations. I currently use Suitcase, but I wondered if anyone has a real leaning towards one or the other, and why? Or is anyone using font book for their font management?

[Jalan]

We currently use ATM Deluxe on our Classic machines and PCs and we use Font Reserve on the OS X platforms.
ATM is rock solid for it's platforms, but Adobe doesn't want to make it for OS X, so I guess stay away from that.
Suitecase and Font Reserve are now owned by the same company so it's a toss up with that. I've heard people using Font Doctor and liking it but I have no real feedback on that.
Font Reserve causes us some issues and crashes a lot in connection with Quark 6. It does seem to handle PC fonts fairly well. I now do half of the PC jobs on my OSX machine using Font Reserve.
Font Book has been hit or miss for us. Sometimes when a font doesn't want to work with Font Reserve for some odd reason, we bring up Font Book and it works! Bizarre. If it works, I guess I wont argue.

So in my conclusion, I have no full recommendation. Font management seems to be one of the weakest things on OS X. It's gotten a lot better with each version, so maybe 10.4 will be better. Stick with what you got and see where things are in six months or so.

[willisnr]

Thanks for the info Jalan. I wasn't aware that ATM is no longer being produced for OSX. Suitcase seems to be the best app, although I have had similar experiences with Font Book - I have also been saved by using Font book on occasion.

Your conclusion is spot on. Font management is crucial for our studio, and it has gotten way out of control.

I have had occasions when I have substituted a clients PC font with a Mac equivalent, which will look fine, only to find that the leading has moved slightly for each line. The result will be the text flowing outside the text box in quark. Although quark warns you with a red mark, a slight change may only affect certain text boxes. This can be a problem when dealing with 100+ page catalogues and brochures...

- lets hope that OSX "tiger" will improve on Font Book...

Thanks again
Will

[almaink]

"- lets hope that OSX "tiger" will improve on Font Book..."

lets hope it don't take that long, 10.3.6 should be out soon and better fix this font mess it's getting to be ridiculous.

[geozinger]

lets hope it don't take that long, 10.3.6 should be out soon and better fix this font mess it's getting to be ridiculous.

No kidding! The current situation with fonts is unreasonable.

Font management has now become a time waster.

[Sparky]

I've been dealing with fonts and font management for over 15 years. I grew up with Suitcase starting with v 2.x I now use X1 on my G4 w/Jaguar and have seen none of the problems everybody talks about. I think the key to trouble free font management is knowing what fonts you have, catalog them all into Foundry folders, search out and delete older duplicates, clean out any folders that don't need to exist (OS X puts fonts in about 4 different places not to mention the ones it finds in Classic), Try not to let the same font from different types exist i.e Helvetica True Type and Helvetica PostScript, and or Helvetica OpenType (I like those fonts).

Adobe advised us to NOT use ATM deluxe either in OS 9.x or X but instead for classic use ATM light v 4.6 and Suitcase together. ATM helps with on screen smoothing and displaying fonts in Classic but as someone else pointed out, they don't make it for OS X ATM has become outdated for the new OS.

As far as our PCs go ATM deluxe 4.1 has been a workhorse for us. No Suitcase on the PC's ATM running in Win2K has been flawless.

I think OpenType technology has really opened the door to cross compatibility, now when my clients (who use Adobe CS) send files to me I can easily cross platform their files from PC to Mac without worrying about font issues, or weather the I have the postscript from PC in Mac format.

Our bottom line is: Mac = Suitcase (+ ATM light in Classic)), PC = ATM

[bsdeegeek]

Originally Posted by Sparky

...clean out any folders that don't need to exist (OS X puts fonts in about 4 different places not to mention the ones it finds in Classic),

Agreed. They're everywhere. Our shop has had mostly success with completely wiping out all fonts (save one or two system fonts) and loading only those fonts supplied or added by preflight, loaded into the fonts subfolder of the job directory. I just made links to the user fonts directory on the all the OSX desktops, then drag them in, fontbook activates them, then trash them after the job is done. A few hiccups here and there, but for the most part we find this works really well. We once had a problem with Minion and did a search on the local drive. There were hundreds of minions (heh, punny) all over the hard drive. Thus, the new policy.

bsd.

[almaink]

"I now use X1 on my G4 w/Jaguar " the key word Sparky is Jaguar. We are talking Panther here. I never had any font problems while running Jaguar either, they all started with Panther.