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Question

Suitcase Fusion vs Font Explorer® X

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
October 1, 2009
6 replies
24644 views

I've been using Suitcase Fusion for a few years now and its kind of been fine really. I love the way it handles fonts with Quark and Indesign well.

I'm now in teh process of getting a new MBP 17" with Snow Leopard and was wondering if Font Exporer X is better or not?

Has anyone made the switch to it? is it better? faster? good at auto activiation?

many thanks for your comments.

This topic has been closed for replies.

A

Anonymous

It's obvious, as with anything, that people tend to like that which they use and they'll defend it vehemently, to the point of making themselves look foolish.

I've been dealing with font management for decades, since the early pre OSX versions of Mac OSs.

I've gone back and forth from one solution to the next, never bearing allegiance to any software developer.

There's pro's and cons to every piece of software and fonts are a particualr pain in the arse, as they utilize a lot of system resources.

So with that being said, here's a cold, hard fact...

FontExplorerX is made by Linotype. Linotype develops & distributes typefaces.

So the question you should ask yourself is, do you trust your Ferrari to the Yugo mechanic or do you bring it to the Ferrari mechanic?

FontExplorer has given me infinitely less problems in it's entire short history than Suitcase did the first year alone that I used it when it first came out back in the day.

Type management built from a company which has a solid history of type development. Makes sense, no?

BobLevine

Community Expert

Your logic is completely lost on me.

J

jhjhhjh

Participating Frequently

Probably not the best analogy.

I'm glad this topic picked up again because I've intended to report in.

I gave the Font Explorer trial about 3 weeks. There were little things about it that I didn't care for. Probably more of a personal nature in that I was accustomed to Suitcase for a number of years, despite that it peed me off on occassion. I don't even recall exactly what it was that I didn't care for with Explorer X. It was 2 months or so ago - a long time for my pea brain to recall. Basically fiddly nitpicky stuff.

It took longer than Suitcase to activate fonts each time I opened a file. It also required me to click OK to activate fonts, or do something of that nature, each time. There could be a setting to avoid doing this.

I've upgraded to Suitcase 5 and haven't had a single problem (yet). It's way easier than previous versions to add fonts and in all it's just been doing everything that could be expected, smooth as can be.

One problem I did have, was trouble with InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop freezing on me. It turned out that the software was looking for my Font Explorer install, which I thought I had thoroughly uninstalled. Not so. For those who may have the same problem, when you uninstall Font Explorer you also have to manually remove the plugin file from the plugins folder of each application - InDesign etc. At least that was my experience.

Anyways, I'm now happy with Suitcase 5. I run Windows 7.

Thanks to all who contributed their 2 cents

Keith

F

finktank

Participating Frequently

Suitcase 4 has been a disaster for us. It's many issues mean we loose a vast amount of time and work fixing issues or suffering unexceptable performance. The FM core corrupts (as it often does with the server version as well) and needs to be replaced or requires a full reinstall. It corrupts font vault so a backup copy needs to be setaside and replaced after a new installation. Duplcate fonts can cause seriousproblems. An example of this is when we installed an update of Microsoft Office, which installs it's own font folder in the system library. Plugins in abobe software has to be the biggest issue and are best dactivated or removed negating the whole reason for having the software in the first place. My view would be to test a trial verison with a copy of you font library and go for the program which offers the most stability. You live happier that way!

BobLevine

Community Expert

Suitcase Fusion 4 has been replaced with Suitcase Fusion 5. Each version gets better and this is no exception.

Autoactivation works flawlessly in my experience.

F

finktank

Participating Frequently

I would usually agree that any version is usually better than the previous and I'm sure Suitcase 5 has some great features. However, since version 4 has preformed so badly we would think twice before upgrading. Its also telling that since that Suitcase Fusion 4 wasn't tested on Mavericks operating system. Extensis recently told this to me in an email and why one can only guess that they wish to force users to upgrade.

M

mac_jockey

Participant

I'd like to weigh in here. The dates on these posts and the fact that you are all discussing Snow Leopard has me a bit confused.

Font Explorer is by far the better program. Suitcase has an overall sluggishness about it that tends to slow users down when browsing our font library. Also, when initially importing fonts to the program, Font Explorer is about 50% faster in the process. Lastly, I have seen Suitcase 3 spontaneously stop working and need to be re-intalled because the font vault also got corrupted on 3-4 computers in the last year. A few of us run Font Explorer v. 1.2.3 with OSX 10.6.8 and have had none of the above problems.

BobLevine

Community Expert

You’re getting on the reference to Snow Leopard and then you bring up Suitcase Fusion 3?

Suitcase Fusion 4 is the current version. I suggest taking a look at it…it’s a major upgrade.

Bob

M

mac_jockey

Participant

That's another problem. We gave one of our designers a demo of Suitcase v.4

on a 2007 MacPro tower

with 8 GB of RAM. I personally worked with him on set up and experienced

this trademark sluggishness right away. We have a large library of fonts

(approx. 16,000 when all loaded), but Linotype's product has none of the

sluggishness with exact same set of fonts. I've speculated that it has

something to do with the vault that Extensis creates. I'm in discussions

with both companies as we are evaluating both their server products and the

behavior is even present on the server products.

I'll keep you posted.

-Frank

A

Anonymous

FontAgent Pro is better than Both.

T

tonyconteAuthor

Participant

wow, thats a bold statement without any reason? any experience you have with either of the others and why is Font Agent Pro better?

thanks

D

designerdave72

Participating Frequently

"Don't fix what ain't broke" or so they say?! I too have been using Suitcase (since v8) and have experienced not many problems with it. If anything, I've had more problems with certain fonts in families not showing up in the Quark menu list but, as RodneyA points out, it's good to clear the caches (FontNuke recently upgraded to SL) once in a while and this flushes the troubles away. Now that I have migrated to IDCS4 from QXP, I haven't experienced any problems with the latest SL/SF/ID and associated auto-activation. Just keep in mind that a lot of people don't - fonts can be temperamental and so any font client/application that uses fonts will be also...

T

tonyconteAuthor

Participant

probably wise words designerdave - thanks

RodneyA

Participating Frequently

I like Font Explorer X Pro. It's no long free (for the current version) but it has automatic font activation for CS4 products, and various useful features. Some of the features -- like fixing problems with duplicate fonts -- are not exactly intuitive, but once you look them up in the manual, the features are there. I like being able to erase font caches too, since I've had problems with those in the past.

Version 2.02 didn't work with Snow Leopard, but an upgrade came out a few days back and so far it's been fine.

I've never used Suitcase Fusion.

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