Being a graphic designer, having some sort of font management tool is a must for me. I started using FEX back in the free days, and bought it when it went Pro, mainly because I didn't want to start over from scratch, and because I wanted to thank the developers for keeping it free for so long. I was expecting that the program would then grow and get better. I was wrong.
Unfortunately, I've had issues with crashing when trying to delete or remove fonts (it happens about 90% of the time), none of which have been resolved by communicating with the developers. I'm stubborn, so I just relaunch and keep trying until I wipe them out.
Other issues: painstakingly slow to activate/deactivate fonts when you have many in the library (and I have a monstrous load of them), no printing options, doesn't recognize duplicates unless certain information is exactly the same, occasionally all fonts (except system fonts) are deactivated after a crash, and so on. I've also run into some problems using the InDesign plug-in, which I just leave off now.
On the plus side, auto-activation is nice (aside from InDesign issues), it's easy to browse through a preview of all your fonts, and you can view all the font characters and font information.
I've tried so hard to like this for so long, but I'm thinking it will be time to try out other options soon.
FontExplorer X Pro
Professional font management utility.
Version: 2.0.3
Buggy but indispensable
Feedback Type: Review
Contributed by: rjc70 Thursday, September 17 2009 @ 04:42 PM PDT
Product Platform: MacOSX
Used Product For: Over One Year
Recommend Product: NO
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Comments
Buggy but indispensable - rjc70
I believe the website said a SL-compatible version would be released last week… that didn't happen obviously.In the meantime, I'm trying out the alternatives, now using Font Suitcase. It's much much much faster and with a smoother interface. It has its own issues, but I've only had a couple crashes with it so far.
Friday, September 25 2009 @ 09:58 AM PDT
Buggy but indispensable - sgmams
It is now even more buggy with Snow Leopard. There are some serious incompatibilities with FEXPro and SL. There is nothing on the Linotype web site about this. Lino acknowledges the problems but so far there is no fix, in spite of the fact that SL has been out for a few weeks.Having paid for version 2, I expected decent and timely support. So far, that has not been the case.
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Wednesday, September 23 2009 @ 12:36 PM PDT