Review: Extensis Suitcase Fusion

• Article 10 of 89
• MacFormat, March 2006

Extensis's Suitcase has been one of those apps that has been around for years that most people ignore. A font management app in the vein of ATM Deluxe and OS X's Font Book, it's always been there, always done more or less what it's supposed to, always with a few irritating bugs. It gets updated regularly, with negligible improvements each time, usually to cope with an OS X update or a new version of Quark or Creative Suite. But it's never quite done exactly what you've needed and never quite justified its price tag.

Suitcase Fusion is perhaps the first release of Suitcase that's actually come close to being the font utility every designer needs. It builds on the relatively simple font management capabilities of Font Book, by letting you keep track of all the fonts on your system wherever they may be. If an application needs a font that isn't installed in the standard OS X locations, Suitcase will activate it - without moving it, unlike Font Book. It can analyse your fonts for corruption, duplication and other font complaints. You can also manually activate fonts, either individually or by set; if you're not sure what font you'd like, you can search by typeface, foundry, keywords or classifications. A preview pane gives you a WYSIWYG view of fonts so you can be happy with your choices without having to try them in a document.

Fusion is an apt name for this program since it's an amalgam of the best parts of Suitcase and Font Reserve, which Extensis acquired last year. While Font Reserve customers can be assured that the capabilities of their redoubtable package continue to live on in Fusion, Suitcase users will be more at home since Fusion is very much Suitcase with extra Font Reserve rather than vice versa.

However, Font Reserve does bring some very good features to the program. Font Vault is a repository for fonts, designed to give granular control over font activation. When you add a font to Suitcase, you have the option of copying it to Font Vault. If you do that, font suitcases will be stripped apart so that each font is stored in its individual faces so you can activate them by themselves rather than as a group.

Font Reserve's analysis tools give you far more detail about each individual font than Suitcase's old system used to. While this could all just be technical information for typography trainspotters, it's put to good use by Suitcase: when a font needs to be activated, Suitcase uses the metrics it has recorded to ensure that the font is the correct one, not just a close match. Lastly, Font Reserve's application font sets lets you set up a group of fonts for a particular application that will activate when you launch it.

For former Font Reserve users, there are some features of Suitcase to look forward to such as the preview pane, checking and repair tools, and Suitcase's quick search functions. In comparison to Suitcase users' jump up, though, there are fewer extras to enjoy, although Suitcase's interface is a definite improvement.

In practice, as with every previous version of Suitcase, there are niggly bugs that get in the way of nirvana. On slower machines, switching between applications can drop from instantaneous to a three-second delay when Fusion is running and some of the application plug-ins can have a difficult time working out whether you've launched the app or not.

It's not quite the full monty, however. The fact it's not integrated into OS X with a preference pane, giving the user a truly seamless font management experience, is perhaps its biggest failing. Linotype FontExplorer X, which is free yet has a good subset of Fusion's functions, makes you wonder how Extensis justifies the $100 price tag. And while Extensis bundles a copy of $70 FontDoctor X with Suitcase, the fact this is a separate program with its own sensibilities and management style means there's an odd disconnect between the two that needn't be there and makes Suitcase's diagnosis and repair functions look undernourished by comparison.

Nevertheless, Suitcase is an excellent tool that has gone from an interesting curiosity to full Swiss army knife in the space of a release. For designers, it's finally earned a fixed place in the toolbox.