Extensis Suitcase Fusion review

As all serious design professionals know, you need a serious font management tool to take care of a serious font collection.

For many years, Suitcase has been one of the favourites, and Suitcase Fusion is the latest version of this tool. The big news is that Extensis has merged (OK, fused) the features of Suitcase with Diamondsoft's Font Reserve, which had been a high-powered rival. The company calls the result 'the future of font management'. This is a big claim, but it does seem clear that Suitcase Fusion is a real step forward.

The basics of using Suitcase haven't changed. The panelled interface will be familiar to existing users, and you'll be able to carry on working as before. The Font Reserve aspect isn't particularly apparent in use, as it is largely employed to improve the inner workings of Suitcase. Some changes will be noticed: for example, you can now work with a Font Reserve-style 'vault', a centrally managed font repository that provides more reliable font management, minimising conflicts and improving activation speed. Fonts can still be stored in the old way, but Suitcase Fusion is able to manage the collections better through its vault approach. Like its predecessor, Suitcase Fusion can manage the standard Mac OS X-supplied fonts as well as your own collections. In fact, it prefers to do so, as it can help to eliminate one of the last sources of duplicate font confusion.

New features include Font Sense, a typeface identification technology that helps ensure proper font activation. This ensures one client's copy of a font isn't opened instead of one from a different client. Font Sense plug-ins for InDesign, Illustrator CS and CS2 plus QuarkXPress 6.x are included. Where a font isn't available, Suitcase uses what it knows about the typeface to offer a selection of 'next best' alternates.

When you're searching for the perfect font, the preview options are very useful, as is the ability to search and sort by classification (Modern, Script, Ornamental, Humanist Sans, and so on) and foundry. When you've found the right faces, you add them to sets. And due to Suitcase's support for nested sets you can group sets within others for easy management. Finally, drag-and-drop import and export support has improved. Drop a folder onto Suitcase and it'll find and include any fonts inside, and just drag out typefaces to copy.

The Suitcase Fusion installer CD also comes with FontDoctor 7.1, a utility designed to find and, where possible, repair problems with fonts. If you've been collecting fonts for long, especially if you have a hoard from pre-OS X days, Font Doctor is likely to find items that could cause trouble if left alone.

Suitcase Fusion is a solid upgrade to a well-liked product, and the inclusion of Diamondsoft's highly respected Font Reserve software technology adds a measure of high-level robustness that has been lacking for some time. Font Sense may seem no more than a new spin on the old font activation features, but it works well and will help busy studios avoid using the wrong version of a font for a particular job. Suitcase Fusion still faces strong competition from Font Agent Pro, but it is certainly a worthwhile upgrade for all existing Suitcase users.