User Profile for rjc70

Suitcase Fusion 2 13.2.1 (Mac OS X)

maybe best, but still bad  

After using FEX for many years and being frustrated with the bugs, crashes, and slowness of that font management program, I decided to give SF2 a whirl. At first I was pleased with the speed of activation and the clean interface, but the limitations quickly became evident. For small to medium sized font libraries and light usage, it's decent, except for these issues, for which I don't see any reasonable explanation: — not as much info on fonts accessible (all you get are the columns in the main window, no copyright info, etc.) — can't delete fonts from a set and have them deleted from the library as well (huge issue if you try to manage a large library — if you see a font in a set you want to delete, which happens a lot if you're importing fonts into SF2 as it puts them into new sets; you have to remember the name, version, etc., go to the library, find it, *then* delete — for large libraries, that's a PITA) — can't assign more than one classification to a font (what if you want to find a font that's monospaced AND serif?) — as mentioned by a previous reviewer, the library & set management system isn't intuitive If you have a large library of fonts like myself, further problems arise. Sometimes SF2 works quickly, but occasionally it slows to a snail's pace, taking minutes to delete a bunch of fonts. The biggest annoyance is when you have auto-activation on and go to save a file in an Adobe program. Not always, but all too often, there's a long pause when you get the spinning beach ball, then at some point an SF2 progress bar window pops up saying it's finding fonts in the database, then that goes away, then the ball again for a little while. And this is for fonts that were already activated… so why does it need to find them? Again, I'm certain these speed issues won't affect most users, but I'm mentioning them in case another power font user out there is curious. Oh, and the program of course does crash from time to time, but it's not as bad as FEX. Overall, for most users, SF2 would be the best of our current sad choices — clean, fast with smaller libraries. But I'm already getting increasingly frustrated as my trial period ends. As I'm not going to pay for another font manager that will annoy me more than help, I'm off to use Font Agent for a month. If that won't work, I'll grudgingly settle back on FEX. [alert admin]

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Sunday, October 25 2009 @ 12:34 PM PDT

Reunion 9.0b (Mac OS X)

Long-time user  

I'm a long-time user of Reunion…I started over 10 years ago, having used FTM (blech!) before that. I have a fairly large (50,000+) tree, the vast majority of which was manually entered, with lots of notes & sources. What I love of about Reunion is the ease and speed of entering people & data. Once you learn the shorthand codes, it's extremely quick. I've often said that Reunion was perhaps the best program — of any kind — that I use… mostly in terms of speed and stability: it just *works*. My favorite features include the find and list functions and the ability to save marked sets of individuals. Although a few other apps have now surpassed it in my eye (InDesign & Illustrator, e.g.), I still think Reunion ranks high. That being said, there are a couple drawbacks, already mentioned in previous reviews. The web export is too limited in flexibility. It might have been fine years ago, but it's not sophisticated enough for today. I've used other programs to export to web and now use TNG exclusively for my online database. Charting in Reunion is worse. I've never used it successfully. If I need a chart, which is seldom anyway, I'll make it in OmniGraffle or Illustrator. The last upgrade I've purchased was version 8. I tried out version 9, but found no compelling reason to upgrade. I'll reconsider if they improve charts & web export. Overall, though, I still love the program and would recommend it to anyone serious about their genealogy and who won't be needing what Reunion doesn't do as well. [alert admin]

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Wednesday, October 14 2009 @ 06:38 AM PDT

FontExplorer X Pro 2.0.2 (Mac OS X)

Buggy but indispensable  

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. [alert admin]

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Thursday, September 17 2009 @ 04:42 PM PDT

Buggy but indispensable  

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.

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Friday, September 25 2009 @ 09:58 AM PDT