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| Panther
In Depth: Not Fond of Font Book |
© 10-29-03
András Puiz
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Font Book is part of Apple's attempt to tell graphics professionals, whose staggering 71 percent haven't yet made the switch to OS X, that it is time now. Panther's font features, available to any Cocoa application, have received an almost insane upgrade, letting you specify single or double color underlines and strikethroughs, as well as text shadows where you can micromanage aspects like blur, distance, opacity and angle. Open the ligatures palette in TextEdit, and you'll have a week's worth of typographic bonanza to drool over. The character palette will have you gasp for air for minutes. All in all, typography is now just plain un-freakin'-believable in Mac OS X.
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| Typography in InDesign 3.0? No, this is Mail… |
But where were we? Oh yeah, I was talking about tricking graphics professionals into upgrading. Did I mention PostScript to PDF conversion in Preview, as part of that ploy? Anyway, I'm supposed to talk about Font Book here. Unfortunately.
For Font Book is a huge disappointment. Not only is it buggy, but it's also confusing, frustrating and underpowered. If you're a professional hoping that Apple was going to give you a free alternative to the $99.95 Suitcase from Extensis (read an Applelust review of an earlier version) in Mac OS X 10.3, hope again. Font Book offers no auto-activation whatsoever. Neither does it manage fonts in any random location: all it does is copy fonts between the many Mac OS X Fonts folders, and manage a Preferences list that tells the system not to activate some fonts even though they're in one of those folders. That's where font management begins and ends. Sure, you can look at lists of fonts, do searches in them, view font samples, turn fonts on and off, and be casually warned of duplicates, which aren't seen here a bad thing at all, rather a fact of life. But you cannot create reports, examine fonts, manage damaged files, or import/export font collections. Worse, even Font Book's limited functionality is quite counterintuitive, overcomplicated and buggy.
Which is also bad news for beginners. Using Font Book, they may be tricked into believing that they now have control over their fonts. Well, they don't. They will be, instead, subjected to the whims of an application that will fail them so often that I think it should be rewritten from scratch. We don't need Font Book 1.1; we need 2.0. Or maybe Apple should even change Font Book's name in order to save some face.
Okay, it's really time for me now to back up what I've just said with some real information. So, I'm taking my pain killers, and start off my Font Book tour right away.
How to Book for Fonts
When double-clicking a font file in the Finder, one of two things will happen. If that font isn't installed in your system, a preview pane will show up, and a button offering you to install that font. Installation means copying it into one of three possible locations: your main Fonts folder (in the OS X Library), making it available for the entire computer, i.e. all users; your own Fonts folder, so only you can use it; or the Classic Fonts folder inside your OS 9 System Folder, so that Classic apps can use it too. You can choose between these three settings in Font Book's preferences. The following screen shot depicts such an event. Why so many windows? We'll see later.
If the font you've clicked on is already installed, Font Book will launch (or become active), and highlight that font. Or, at least, it will highlight a font by that name that's already installed – Font Book won't bother to tell you about duplicates or conflicting versions. In many cases, it will also fail to highlight the font you clicked on at all; it will just launch and show a font it happens to have in mind at the moment – an obvious, and annoying, bug. But if the app deigns to show you the right font, here's what you'll be likely to see:
Font Book has three panes. On the left, you can see your font collections (looking and working just like iTunes playlists, as everything tends to do these days). The middle pane shows the list of fonts belonging to the current collection. The right pane shows a customizable preview, and if you choose to display it, also a small box at the bottom showing some information on the font selected.
Let's look at font collections first. These are the same things you might remember from Jaguar's Font Panel, the small, resizable window that lets you select fonts and also do some basic font management. In Panther, the Font Panel still remains capable of managing these collections (plus much more, including shadows, underlines, styles, etc.), so it can create new collections and adding fonts to them, or remove them by dragging them off the panel (which is another gig for our friend the Smoke Puff effect); but now the new Font Book can do all of that too, matching Font Panel's functionality almost exactly. Anyway, a little redundancy hasn't hurt anybody. In Font Book, there's one thing you can do that you cannot in the Font Panel: enabling or disabling font collections. As set in Font Book's preferences, these can mean either of two functionalities: disabling all fonts inside that collection (even if they are part of other collections too), or just disabling the collection itself, which doesn't do much: it greys out the collection's name in Font Book, and won't show that collection in the Font Pane. All of its fonts will be intact.
There are three (or four, depending how you count it) special font collections, too, shown on the top of your collections list. "All Fonts" shows all of the fonts installed on your machine. Its disclosure triangle reveals three other collections: "User," denoting fonts available only to the currently logged-in user; "Computer," or fonts in the main Mac OS X Fonts folder; and "Classic Mac OS," meaning fonts residing in the Fonts folder inside the OS 9 System Folder. Removing a font from these built-in collections will move the associated font file to the trash. While no help file I've found will tell you, it appears as though fonts in the Classic Mac OS collection will also be available to your entire OS X; making that category the broadest of the three. Needless to say, it ignores fonts managed by an OS 9 font management utility like Adobe Type Manager: it only handles fonts placed in the OS 9 System Folder. I haven't yet been able to test Font Book with Extensis Suitcase, but members of our staff report that Suitcase isn't
currently compatible with Panther.
In the middle pane, font families are listed alphabetically. Disclosure triangles will reveal the contents of the families. You can also see their activation status in this view, as well as any duplicates, indicated by a dot. ("Resolving duplicates," a promising menu point, does nothing more than disable duplicates of the highlighted font, keeping the highlighted one. It won't elaborate on the nature of duplicates, unlike Adobe Type Manager did for Mac OS 9.) There's no way to sort fonts or families in any other way except their names – like by status, location, number of font files, type, etc. You can do an iTunes-like search that narrows down your current font list, though, by font name – a nice feature.
Finally, the right pane shows a customizable preview, as well as a so-called "Font Info" bit, which will tell you the current font's PostScript name (if any), copyright details, and other information, but not its location. Astonishingly, that information is only available as a tooltip, if you hover your pointer over a font's name in the middle pane. However, clicking Command-R will reveal the selected font files in the Finder.
In the three panes of Font Book, you can look at, select, drag and drop, enable, disable, add, or delete fonts and collections. As we've seen, what will happen when removing a font depends on where you're removing it from: if you're doing it while the "All Fonts" collection or its three built-in subcategories is selected in the left pane, removal will mean deletion. It would be nice, therefore, if you could change the selection in the left pane while retaining the focus in the middle pane (changing, in other words, where you're deleting the selected font from), but alas, no such luck. Changing the selection in the left pane will result in a new (seemingly random) selection in the middle pane as well.
Another strange choice in interface design is the total lack of contextual menus. Apple seems to loathe this nice and useful feature, so users are required to use the application's main menu bar, buttons, or learn non-standard keystrokes, in order to make things happen. Some context-sensitive menu commands would have made quite a lot of sense here: activating/deactivating a font or collection, showing font files in the Finder, managing duplicates – just about everything Font Book does – come to mind.
The Suitcase Bomb
Screen fonts are traditionally located in so-called "suitcase" files, which may also behave like folders: you can copy a suitcase file into another one (!), establishing a hierarchy between them. This is a means that has been often used to group font families into one suitcase (letting the system know that they are the plain, bold or italic variations of the same typeface), or just create random font collections.
However, OS X doesn't let you copy suitcases into one another. Double-clicking on an as yet non-installed suitcase file can result in either of two actions: if the fonts inside the suitcase are named the right way, Panther will view them as a font family, and will let you install them with one click. However, if the fonts inside a suitcase don't apparently form one typeface family, OS X will open as many windows for them as there are fonts, and you'll need to install them separately. Idiotically, this will create several duplicates of the same suitcase file, which will thus appear duplicated in Font Book, and each duplicate of the same screen font file will correspond to a different outline font. If you use Font Book to delete any of these duplicates, it will cause the system not to recognize its corresponding font any more. Sounds confusing? That's because it is, very much so. To Font Book's credit, at least it copies the right outline fonts into the right folders alongside the screen fonts it's (mis)managing.
The Verdict
Not only is this application far from user-friendly or full-featured, it's also buggy. Any of Font Book's operations can fail at any time without any predictable reason. Some font collections, notably "Classic Mac OS," tend to disable themselves, and refuse to be re-enabled. Fonts may disappear randomly from collections, and disabling them doesn't always work. Font Book also tends to hang, and when forced to quit, it may decide to hold a grudge against you and fail to operate properly until you log off and back in. In my tests, it has also necessitated several actual restarts, sabotaging some of my login sessions completely and rendering my machine totally non-responsive at times.
All in all, I'd find it pretty hard to recommend Font Book to anyone. True, it also has a networked font management feature, which I've been unable to test, so that can perhaps make it useful in circumstances I haven't been able to verify.
If you don't have too many fonts, and the existing ones need no special "management," then count your blessings. Don't ask for trouble, and stay away from Font Book. If you want to manage a large and complicated font collection, use Extensis Suitcase, that is, once a Panther-compatible version comes outz. Hide its icon somewhere where your kids can't reach it.
If you feel your fonts are secure, but want to shorten their overly long list occasionally; or you want to make some fonts available to your Classic environment; or just want to look at font samples every now and then; or install the odd new font once every blue moon – then rejoice: Font Book may be just for you. But be very careful with it. Be very, very careful. It bites.
