FontVista X - 4.0

This program is a nice try at getting it right....
I just purchased this program (against my better judgement-esp after reading all the BAD reviews it has received), but since all of our fonts are licensed and kept in immaculate condition, I purchased your software.
WHAT A MISTAKE!
Just like everyone else says, FontVista SUCKS!

Thanks for wasting my time trying to print out 4000 fonts. Crashes everytime. NICE WORK!

This is better than most I've tried, but that ain't saying much.

I like the interface and the ability to pick and choose individual files. It opens folder (and subfolders) of fonts pretty fast, even when you're opening more than a thousand at once, and plays well with both active and inactive fonts in almost all formats. You can even see a Layout Preview of the pages. I like the options to hide all the active user and system fonts from your list. And, conveniently, it tells you how many fonts you've selected for printing, and how many pages that'll take.

The biggest problem is the gigantic bug that also plagues many competitors: corrupt fonts. If it encounters font that is damaged, missing a resource, or just has a bad attitude, the printing process is cancelled instantly, and the program doesn't even let you know an error has occured: the file simply fails come out of the printer. There are 2 fixes to this that I'm aware of: 1) check the "print pages as seperate files" option in the preferences, which seems to work a little better, or 2) manually scan the Layout Preview and seek out any fonts that are defaulting or bitmapping.

Option 1 is much slower, and it's useless if you're saving the file as a pdf, which i prefer so that I can save it for later printing (or take my 800 pages to Kinko's). Option 2 is more than tedious when you're printing thousands of fonts.

Also, I've had quite frequent problems with crashing, usually RIGHT AFTER it's imported a whole folder of fonts.

And though it is pretty fast at actually opening the fonts, it takes an indecent amount of time to rebuild the font list in the window when you make changes to the list. In fact, I've found it faster (when I'm building a series of font lists) to quit and re-launch the program, rather than wait for it to rebuild the list after I close the previous set of fonts.

And though you can control the number of fonts per page, columns, etc, and you can change the preview text, there are really not many layout options. For instance, you can't print a complete character map of a font (a feature that's pretty useful for referencing your dingbats and non-latin alphabets).

And you don't have many choices about what information is included on the printout. You can print the screen name OR family/style name, but not both. And there's not option for listing the font format, id#, printer font name, foundry, or other potentially useful information. You can change the page footer, but you have to go to the preferences pane.

It doesn't play well with MM fonts, but there's no option for globally de-selecting them. Also,
I wish there were a way of screening out expert, alt, and ligature versions of fonts, and a way to detect and deselect damaged fonts. It would also be nice to have process for analyzing duplicate or similar fonts, or organizing fonts by family. Or, better yet, include an option to print each font family on a separate page.

And like many competitors, it prints an annoying big black box in the place of missing characters (such as on fonts that have no lowercase characters or missing punctuation). Why not just leave those spaces blank???

You can't view individual fonts. You have to go to the Layout Preview and find it, laid out in order with all the other fonts on your list. And to make it worse, the Layout Preview window shows EVERY font you currently have imported, whether you've chosen them to print or not. I wish this window would update live as you check and uncheck fonts, so you can get a more realistic view of the layout, and use the preview double-check for any problems.

I wish the single-page print preference would work even if you're saving as a pdf.

And last but certainly not least, I wish you could save Suitcase-like "sets" of your imported fonts, so you can go back and add to or change your font library without starting from scratch.

Overall, I think it just barely meets my needs, but there are so many ways it could be better. For now, I reluctantly recommend it. But we'll see if they can improve future versions.

So, after a good long while of hating this software, I decided to take another crack at it. I downloaded the latest versions of FontVista and FontDoctor. FontDoctor found nothing wrong with my library, so I gave FontVista a go. Still locks hard. So I decided to do some digging. Console turned up font subsystem rendering errors with a bitmap-only font I've had since the System 7 days. Pulled it, ran again. Repeated this process 4 times.

Now that all of my corrupted fonts are gone (no thanks to FontDoctor), FontVista works pretty damn well. I don't organize into subfolders or use any font management software. I just have 1300 fonts in my /Library/Fonts folder, and it prints to printers and saves as a PDF wonderfully. In the time I could not get FV to work, I couldn't find anything comparable, and now that it is working, I'm extremely happy at the functionality of the program.

My suggestion to ANYONE with FV issues is to check the Console for log entries that may indicate font issues that FontDoctor can't detect. Once you get past that point, it seems to me smooth sailing.

I tend to agree with the aggregate of reviews here. FontVista is a great concept; however, when it comes to delivery, this application fails to meet expectations. Unlike other comments, however, I have heard back from Morrison SoftDesign (the creators of FontVista). They were actually very cordial and offered to pay me my money back had I actually purchased the application. I recommend that everyone try FontThing from PiDog. Their site is here: www.pidog.com/fontthing The application is a little slow when it comes to processing large catalogs; however, it works, subfolders and all! I printed out a PDF catalog of several thousand fonts on my system by having FontThing scan a selected folder from one of my hard-drives. It works great for me.

This latest release fixes the common problems that all font software developers were forced to deal with when OSX Panther was released several months ago.

Note that we invite all helpful and constructive feedback on all of our software products and for almost 10 years we have always honored our Money Back guarantee without question, and will continue to do so.

if you have any questions about this then please contact us directly at techSupport@MorrisonSoftDesign.com