Font Managers

This is a bit off topic, but does anyone use a font manager that they're happy with?

I have started doing a lot more typesettings in my outputs both for client books, and ease of design and I've been frustrated by the tools available. Now I admit that I'm a font hoarder, and have about 25000 font files, which come to about 18000 fonts -- only about 500 of which are "professional" fonts.

I had been using AMP Font viewer until recently, but it's just a viewer and it isn't a font manager. You have to have the font installed and you can use it to find the font you want.

About a year ago, I started using Font Agent Pro, but it has a lot of issues, and although it's nice and has a lot of good features it isn't very good at actually letting you find the font you want. It's a pain with organization and actually finding the font you want. It also isn't very good at finding corrupted fonts and telling you which font is the bad one.

I also tried High-Logic's MainType but it is simply too slow .. maybe if I used 50 fonts but that'll never happen.

Anyone else have anything they use that I should try?

I should mention that my main machine is a Vista 64-bit, which maybe moved to 7 64-bit soon.

I use Proxima Font Expert. It runs wonderfully on Windows 7 64bit and also worked flawlessly on Vista 64bit before I upgraded. It has a free trial and is very well priced. I've tried many including the big gun of Extensis Suitcase Fusion and haven't found anything to match Font Expert.

I agree; FontExpert is the best font manager currently available.

HankScorpio wrote in post #10016734
I use Proxima Font Expert. It runs wonderfully on Windows 7 64bit and also worked flawlessly on Vista 64bit before I upgraded. It has a free trial and is very well priced. I've tried many including the big gun of Extensis Suitcase Fusion and haven't found anything to match Font Expert.

We use Extensis suitcase at the printing company I work for.

chrisa wrote in post #10017341
We use Extensis suitcase at the printing company I work for.

We had to stop using it because it refused to work properly and kept crashing the Macs especially using the server fed version. We use Linotype Font Explorer X on Macs now.

aram535 wrote in post #10015182
Now I admit that I'm a font hoarder, and have about 25000 font files, which come to about 18000 fonts -- only about 500 of which are "professional" fonts.

And that doesn't slow your computer down?

I've been using AMP at my office for years and I don't have to have the font installed. We keep our font collection on a storage drive and can search when we need to.

We only add the fonts to suitcase on a per job basis. We have access to thousands of Adobe fonts and the customer has to supply their own fonts, if the fonts are not active it will not slow your computer down.

chrisa wrote in post #10017871
We only add the fonts to suitcase on a per job basis. We have access to thousands of Adobe fonts and the customer has to supply their own fonts, if the fonts are not active it will not slow your computer down.

Essentially the same in my office. Outside of the fonts installed with the Adobe suite, we perhaps have 20 additional often used fonts installed on our graphic artists' computers.

HankScorpio wrote in post #10017359
We had to stop using it because it refused to work properly and kept crashing the Macs especially using the server fed version. We use Linotype Font Explorer X on Macs now.

I tried it too, it doesn't seem to like 64-bit environments. it worked on my laptop but on my workstation. I never followed up to see if there was a fix, if the demo doesn't work I usually don't go after support.

Yeah I have about 300 fonts (~500 font files) that I have activated and installed (that's 90% of the "pro" fonts). They cover 60-70% of what I need; Plus some sports/college fonts for posters and such, scripts/"fancy" fonts for wedding books/layouts.

The rest of the time I pull what I need and temporary activate the font and when I exit the font is uninstalled from the system so that doesn't cause any major issues. Recently though I think I somehow corrupted my Basic Helvettica font which is causing some issues in Firefox but that's about it.

I'm pulling in my font library into FontExpert now, and I'm liking what I see so far. The only thing that has annoyed me so far is that it stops to tell me that it can't pull a font during the import for whatever reason and I have to click "ok". It doesn't happen often but that's annoying -- it should just pop a log at the end rather than stopping for user input.

Otherwise it's fast, easy to configure sample text, and find fonts so far although I've tested with a small sample only. It's also half the price of Font Agent which is a big plus.