• Price: 65 . 37

  • Company: Extensis

  • Pros: Merger of the best parts of the popular Suitcase font manager with Font Reserve 3 stablemate. Offers easy font-finding through Font Vault, and smart plug-ins.

  • Cons: Slightly harder to use and learn than the Apple Font Book, but it’s more powerful too.

  • Our Rating: We rate this 8 out of 10 We rate this 8 out of 10

Extensis has been promising this release for a couple of years, and it’s finally arrived. It’s a merger of the company’s popular Suitcase X1 font manager, and the rival Font Reserve 3, which Extensis bought in 2003.

According to the company, this marries the user interface and ease of use of Suitcase with the back-end power of Font Reserve, and adds some more features. Morrison Software’s Font Doctor 7 is also included, to detect and repair corrupt fonts.

border=0 />Existing Suitcase X1 users can transfer all fonts, sets, keywords, and styles automatically when they install Fusion. Font Reserve users get a font and metadata transfer utility. As before, Suitcase Fusion detects and displays all the fonts on your disks, after which you can gather them into sets, then switch them on or off as needed. </p> <p> Fusion now uses the Font Vault – a central storage area where all fonts are copied, with the option to delete fonts from their original locations. They can be exported again by dragging onto the desktop. </p> <p> If you have different fonts with the same name (as opposed to true duplicates), such as the many iterations of Times or Helvetica, Fusion’s Font Sense technology creates unique identifiers within its database. It also automatically separates the different faces within a font suitcase, so if you only need a bold face, that’s all it loads. </p> <p> Font activation is completely automatic – if you open a document that requires fonts you don’t currently have open, Suitcase Fusion loads them automatically. Activation plug-ins are installed for QuarkXPress, InDesign, and Illustrator documents. Fusion gives extended tickbox options in the control panels for these plug-ins. </p> <p> <div class=floatedimage><img src= Print

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