Suitcase Fusion as font management

When you have more than a few hundred fonts on your system, you are going to need font management. I am sure you have noticed that when you start up an application it will run through a list of every font on your system before starting up completely. You can significantly increase your application start up time by minimizing the active fonts on your system.

For font management I use Suitcase Fusion. It allows me to keep active only the fonts I want to use and temporarily turn on additional fonts as I need them. I have collected several thousand fonts over the years and have them all installed on my Mac. I can organize my fonts in any way I want to, then import my font folders to match my local files. If a client sends a font for a job, I can install the font in seconds. Suitcase Fusion copies all of the fonts to a new location, so if you download a font to your desktop and activate it, Suitcase will remember it even if you delete it from your desktop. There is a server version so you can keep thousands of fonts on the server and all of the designers connected to the system can use them.

A free font management tool is Linotype Font Management X. This one is free when it is available. According to the website, they just remove the link between versions.

Bitstream Font Navigator comes with the CorelDraw suite.

Font Book comes installed on a Mac. According to Apple support, Font Book lets you install, search, organize, activate, and deactivate fonts too. When you open it, the interface displays a Collection column on the left that sorts fonts by category, a Font column in the middle that displays all fonts in the selected collection, and a preview pane on the right, which displays a sample of the characters in the selected font. Personally I have never had much luck with this one, the design just seems unintuitive and clunky to me. If anyone is using it successfully I would love to hear about it.

Fontcase will be for the Mac. It is not yet released, but looks very intuitive to use.