You often hear about the comparison between Quark and InDesign. Here is a like for like comparison between two excellent font management applications.

Being a Suitcase X1 user, it was imperative for me to compare it to Linotype’s new release FontExplorer X. Both applications are excellent and are definitely tools for pros. If you are looking at a font management application for Macs and you are not sure which one you should use, this feature comparison might help you make a decision. This comparison was done using Mac OS X 10.4.2 (Tiger), with Classic environment version 9.2.

Starting up the applications and system requirements

Both FontExplorer X and Suitcase take about the same time to load. They can be set to start up at log-in. Also the speed of importing fonts is more or less the same. Suitcase X1 and FontExplorer X are only available for Macs, though previous versions of both programs are available also for Windows. Here are the system requirements in detail:

FontExplorer X
Mac Os X 10.3.9 or later
32 MB free memory
250 MB hard disk space
[1] More information.

Suitcase X1
Mac OS X 10.2.6 - 10.4
Power Mac G3, G4 or G5
128 Megabytes of RAM
30 Megabytes of hard disk space
[2] More information.

While Suitcase X1 works with earlier version of Mac OS X compared to FontExplorer X, the latter is free.

Application support and font activation

Both Suitcase X1 and FontExplorer X support InDesign CS (plug-in required which is included in the packages), InDesign CS 2 QuarkXPress (Xtension required, also included in the package), Photoshop, Illustrator, MS Word for Mac and others.

FontExplorer X gives you control over which applications requiring font activation will be ignored. This is a control that Suitcase X1 does not give you. When I tried FontExplorer X with QuarkXPress 6 though, FontExplorer X did not work at all. Not only it didn’t auto-activate fonts, already activated fonts did not show up in QuarkXPress’ font list. This is despite having installed FontExplorer X’s Xtension. Unfortunately I cannot tell whether this was caused by a bug in the font management application or something else.

When opening the same document with Suitcase X1 and FontExplorer X (an InDesign CS document), Suitcase X1 did a better job than FontExplorer X. All fonts bar one (which was missing in Suitcase X1’s database) were activated after having handled a few quesries for duplicate fonts that Suitcase X1 presented. When using FontExplorer X, while the duplicate fonts pane is clearer than Suitcase X1’s, I wasn’t allowed to open all fonts. The only message I got was that not all fonts could be activated, without any explanation of why (the problem was caused by duplicate fonts). Several fonts were missing when I finally opened the document. However this wasn’t the case for all documents. I have opened several and generally FontExplorer X did a good job with the auto-activation.

FontExplorer X has a major drawback: There is no temporary activation nor auto-deactivation, features that are both present in Suitcase X1. Suitcase X1 allows you to open fonts temporarily until restart. Also, when a document using certain fonts is closed, Suitcase X1 will automatically close those fonts. While sometimes this feature is buggy, it closes fonts that are used by other documents that are left open, it allows a designer to keep order in his fonts—designers don’t have to figure out which fonts are still in use and which are not and usually don’t need to manually deactivate fonts. With FontExplorer X any font deactivation has to be done manually.

Both Suitcase and FontExplorer support font activation in Classic environment.

Font management

FontExplorer X’s font management is superior to Suitcase X1 in certain aspects. First of all, FontExplorer X can move or copy all your fonts in alphabetical order into a “managed folder”, where it also gets rid of duplicates. This feature is not available in Suitcase X1.

In FontExplorer X you can preview fonts one by one or in their family, just in case they feel lonely. Suitcase X1 doesn’t care about family ties, so it only shows you fonts as they are in their suitcases.

When removing fonts from FontExplorer X, you can decide whether the fonts will be just removed from FontExplorer’s database or they will also deleted from the hard drive. Suitcase X1 will only remove them from its database and will leave the fonts where they are on the hard drive.

Suitcase X1 can repair damamaged fonts, while FontExplorer X cannot. Linotype states that this is a choice they made to avoid braches in copyright. Directly from [3] Linotype:

FontExplorer X has a richer array of previews than Suitcase X1, and this allows FontExplorer X users to see better and quicker whether their font sets are complete.

Suitcase X1 can collect all fonts in a set inside a folder in your hard drive. A useful function when fonts are needed for output, though users of QuarkXPress and InDesign will find this option not really essential, as they can use the applications’ built-in collect for output/package functions. I have personally never used Suitcase X’s collect for output option.

Inspired by Spotlight’s Smart Search folders in OS X Tiger, FontExplorer X has Smart Sets. These are dynamic sets which will search for any fonts with a certain criteria previously established by the user. Suitcase X1 does not have this feature.

FontExplorer X allows you to explore documents, such as PDFs, to find embedded fonts. This function could be useful if you lack preflight software and cannot tell whether you embedded fonts into a PDF correctly.

With FontExplorer X you can export any number of fonts as a ZIP archive, a disk image or simply copy them the way they are. Suitcase X1 doesn not offer all of these features.

The bottom line

FontExplorer X and Suitcase X1 are both tools for pros as I stated earlier. The fact that FontExplorer X is available free it makes the application very appealing. Aside from the price difference, if it wasn’t because of the problem I encountered with QuarkXPress 6 and the lack of temporary activation and auto-deactivation, I would have probably switched from Suitcase X1 to FontExplorer X. I think those two font management applications are both excellent.

More on FontExplorer X:
Read the product announcement from [4] Designorati:Typography Editor, Samuel John Klein [5] Linotype Readies FontExplorerX For Prime Time.