What font management software does Adobe recommend beyond Typekit, if any?

[reidrothenberg]

good morning everyone,

does adobe recommend any particular font client / font management software for use with photoshop, illustrator, etc beyond that of typekit? im sure some will agree that typekit doesn't really do the job, especially for hundreds of typefaces.

thanks so much,

reid

[Mike_Gondek · Accepted solution]

Hi Reidrothenberg,

The forum is visited occasionally by some Adobe employees, but Adobe does not have an official stance on which font manager is the best, so individual opinions are the best you can likely expect. As long as the font manager is updated for the OS then usability & features are probably the most important issue to look for. Also updating your fonts to get rid of any antiquated Type 1 or Type 3 fonts is important to the stability of your machine, and no font manager can resolve the issues of old formats, but they do have tools such s font doctor to clean up your font library.

If you were to ask me I would recommend the biggest name and the most expensive which is Extensis products, for the best usability and reliability.

10 Most Popular Font Managers for Mac & Windows

[reidrothenberg]

thanks, you three, for very helpful responses!

can you please inform me a little more about this type 1 and type 3 font issue related to the stability of my machine? i work on an imac, a year or two old, would love to know more. thanks again!

[Mike_Gondek]

Type 3 fonts thankfully have almost been removed from existence as they used to be notably part of the basic 35 fonts that came with your OS, Laserwriter or certain type foundries in the mid 80s. They would crash your applications when you went to print, and caused other issues.

Type 1 you can tell by the red lowercase a in Illustrator, well it used to be red in previous versions now white reversed.

With Extensis Universal Type Client look for the word postscript and a black lowercase a. I manually added the T1 and TT to our server, and will be removing the duplicate old T1 versions when I can get to that.

Your Truetype and Opentype fonts are pretty safe to use, expect for some of the free fonts that might not be coded well.

Most font managers will have a column for this, even the free font book does, but you lose your font preview to see this. Makes this difficult to know if you can remove the old cut of the font and not have font reflow issues.

If the for example an opentype font has the same postscript name for a type 1 fonts that a file you  pulled for archive, then the opentype will automatically swap. Some foundries though change the name of their fonts when upgrading to opentype, and you may have seen " LT Std". Those letters are good as they mean Linotype Standard and that is an opentype font.

So when purchasing fonts look for opentype format. Truetype is stable too, butt not as many characters and advanced typography features.

[Jeff Witchel, ACI]

I agree with Mike!

Extensis Suitcase is a great choice. I've been using it for years, and it works great -- Suitcase Fusion 7 - Extensis.com

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

As a cost-effective alternative to Extensis, I like FontExplorer. It's very much like an iTunes interface and most upgrades are free. I used to have to manage both in an office and I ended up paying over $500 more over the course of three upgrades for Suitcase compared to Explorer. I use FE at home now.