A QuickTime Look at Panther’s FontBook

by Hadley Stern Jul 01, 2003

Here is a quicktime movie of Panther’s FontBook. This application will make products like Suitcase obsolete and finally integrate font management into Apple’s operating system. As you can see FontBook sports a similar interface to Apple’s Address Book and iPhoto. Like the Address Book you can add groups for however you want to categorize fonts (by job for example). Like iPhoto you can use a scroll bar to zoom in and out of a font. The preferences menu option was grayed out. I suspect preferences will have the ability to turn auto-on and off for fonts in different applications. Enjoy the Quicktime movie.

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Comments

  • This is definately my must-have reason for Panther.  Expose looks cool, but dumping suitcase will be a treat…  It never seems to work quite right and I find that managing fonts for 10-15 jobs at a time hasn’t gotten easier since Suitcase 3 (or whatever it was when they skipped from 3 to 8). 

    Successful font management has eluded me for years and I’m eager to finally get things in shape.

    Catman had this to say on Jul 01, 2003 Posts: 3

  • Fontbook appears to be similar to Apples old extensions manager. All it seems to do is move fonts into and out of the font folders.

    If this is the case, it is much less powerful than FontReserve or SuitCase. Among other things, fonts will have to be kept on the boot disk because of this. Also, fontbook lacks the ability to load fonts when a file is loaded that requires a font that isnt active.

    davidwb had this to say on Jul 02, 2003 Posts: 32

  • oh good golly - Font Book, it may only be a Beta (let’s hope) but it has a 1.0 marked on it.

    It does two things that I can tell:
    1. Preview Fonts (that are enabled)
    2. Disable/Enable Fonts

    It is slow as molasses - on my PB 550/1Gb, it took more than 2 minutes to launch. That was with 217 fonts in Font Book. 217 fonts is child’s play. One cannot expect to waste that much time. Everyone knows by now which of the three Font folders to work with - its faster, way faster and way more convenient to just move fonts in and out by hand.

    I would kill for ATM for Mac OS X.

    Nathan had this to say on Jul 16, 2003 Posts: 219
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