With FontBase Awesome subscription, in addition to all our free features, you'll get a set of advanced features to improve your font management workflow. SuperSearch New Find fonts based on the properties that actually matter: x-height, contrast, weight, and more. I use RightFont for Mac that is a lightweight font manager software. I use it to preview, sync, install and manage fonts on my Macs or Dropbox/Google Drive. It also added font organization functionality for Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, e. Thanks to OS X 10.3’s Font Book, most Mac users don’t need to buy a font management program. But if you have tons of fonts, share a font library with others, or have lots of fonts flowing.

By default, both Windows and Mac come packed with a font management app. But, in the Mac, it’s not really that good. In this article, however, we are going to find the best font manager for Mac. Who should get it. A font manager app would be a central place for all your font collections.

Introduction

Well, it was a long time coming, but I've been through the trenches and come up, sucking chest wound and all, with the Ars review of font management programs. I've also succeeded in not completely losing my mind while the developers updated the apps, nullifying half my criticisms in the process. Giving a lot of time to these programs in a production setting is crucial to seeing how they perform on a daily basis, and I am confident I've thrown enough varied scenarios at each to find out where they succeed and fail.

To people outside of design and typography, I'm sure that the words 'font manager' sound like something taking itself way too seriously—like some sort of gilded spice rack—but for those that need to work with fonts on a daily basis, the font manager is serious business. To prepress houses and service bureaus, it is the pit stop: you turn it on, hit Print, and go deal with the real work—the more time you have to spend dealing with the font management/activation process, the less money you are making. For designers that juggle a range of clients and projects, working with fonts is more a nebulous creative ritual of feeling a brand, and it demands a tool worthy of the task.

In simpler times, you pulled open a drawer, chose between the three sets of steel blocks, said 'I don't care who you are, you're getting Garamond,' and that was that. Nowadays clients are wiser and choosier, fonts are cheaper (not making them out of steel helps), and everyone and their dog is making fonts (the dog fonts are terrible; you really don't want to use those). The result is a need to handle and navigate the abundant libraries available while not stifling that creative process. Now, years after Suitcase started the ball rolling on System 6, we're lucky enough to have some very mature font management tools for Mac OS X. The big three reviewed here—Insider FontAgent Pro, Linotype FontExplorer X, and Extensis Suitcase Fusion—are now all Universal Binaries for Intel Macs. After a slow and rocky start for font management on Mac OS X, it's now good times for font junkies. So with the stage set, let's see how they fared.

Test hardware

• Dual G5 2.0
  • 4.5GB RAM
  • Mac OS X 10.4.8
• MacBook Pro 2.0 CoreDuo
  • 2GB RAM
  • Mac OS X 10.4.8

Test software

Best Font Management For Os X 7

• Insider FontAgent Pro 3.3.0
• Linotype FontExplorer 1.1
• Extensis Suitcase Fusion 12.1.3

But why not use Apple's Font Book?

Before we start, I have to field this question since I know some people are wondering why they should consider spending a dime or bandwidth grabbing a new font manager when Mac OS X seems to have its own included. I'll give a few reasons why Font Book, while a nice utility and a welcome addition to the system, is not enough for professional font management needs:

• You can only preview one font at a time, making it very slow for finding new fonts for a project.
• It doesn't do auto-activation.

Best Font Management For Os X 11

That may not seem like a long list of strikes but collectively that puts Font Book in the doghouse for real-world professional use. If you use the same small set of fonts for most of your work, then it might be good enough, but it is still rather limited in features compared to the apps tested here.