Review: Suitcase Fusion
- Article 7 of 9
- Computer Arts, June 2006
The all-in-one font utility that doesn't quite do it all
Part font organiser, part automated font installer and part font repair tool, the venerable Suitcase has never been a must-have for any designer – more a “nice to have” – since it’s always suffered from bugs and a lack of killer features. The latest, certainly the greatest, but still not the most impressive Suitcase of them all includes a variety of useful new tools that still don’t quite lift it into the category of “indispensable”.
Suitcase Fusion, as it’s called thanks to the inclusion of features from FontReserve, can now strip apart font suitcases when you add them to its “Font Vault”. This lets you choose exactly which fonts you want activated. Auto activation of fonts has been improved so you can define font sets that will be installed when you launch particular applications. Suitcase also gathers far greater information about each typeface, so it will activate the exact variant of the font you wanted. You can drag and drop fonts to collect for export. There are also a number of other usability improvements, such as nested sets, an improved find function and the ability to view PostScript names.
These are all good, useful features. Unfortunately, Suitcase remains as buggy as ever, causing application freezes and frequently failing to activate fonts automatically. When compared with the likes of Font Book and Linotype’s FontExplorer X, which offers the majority of Suitcase’s features for free, the price tag seems extraordinarily high. You’re much better off sticking with FontExplorer X and investing in a copy of FontDoctor X, the source of Suitcase’s font repair capabilities. Try harder next time, Extensis.