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| Review - Extensis' Font Reserve 3.1 | | Date Created: 23 Oct, 2004, 07:05 PM |
 If you have read my Suitcase X1 Review or have followed the industry news, you know that Extensis became an even bigger juggernaut in the font management world after their purchase of Font Reserve from DiamondSoft, Inc. in 2003.
I remember the Extensis press release that came out on June 30th, 2003. To make a long press release short, it said the following about the acquisition of DiamondSoft, Inc,: "...Extensis will continue to market and support both Suitcase and Font Reserve products and will be working with development teams in Portland and the Bay Area to integrate and extend technologies from both font management products into new and innovative solutions in 2004..."
It was an interesting week in the world of font management. Just a few days earlier Apple had previewed Panther (OS 10.3) which featured, among other things, a new "professional" font-management utility called Font Book. I'm sure that to some, this must have appeared to be quite a risk for Extensis. In my humble opinion, time has proven that none of the font management companies had much to worry about from Apple's Font Book. (You can read more about my opinion of Font Book in the Font Book Review in the Font Management section of this site.) |
 As I said in the Suitcase X1 Review, all that was left for commercial font management, not controlled by Extensis, was MasterJuggler from Alsoft and FontAgent Pro from Insider Software which are much smaller players in the cross-platform font management market. In fact Extensis now claims that 98 percent of the professional font management market uses Extensis font management products.
To date, Extensis hasn't done a lot to the existing DiamondSoft, Inc. program except to market it well. I used Font Reserve 3.x for a short time after switching to Jaguar (Mac OS 10.2.x). I really liked its auto-activation support. And the folks at DiamondSoft, Inc. were really great to deal with from a consumer standpoint. My experience with tech support was very good.
The only problem that I ever had with DiamondSoft, Inc. was the way that they handled their resellers. To their credit, they did have a reseller program. Lots of companies don't. But their expectations of a reseller were unrealistic. I remember one of the DiamondSoft, Inc. people explaining to me how many units that I would need to sell in order to to be a direct Font Reserve reseller. I remember laughing out loud at how ridiculous it sounded. |
 Enough about the history. Back to the review...
Although all of the history is interesting, it shouldn't detract from the fact that the folks at DiamondSoft, Inc. did a fairly good job with their product. Font Reserve did offer us a good alternative. And I think the product deserves a little respect in the market place.
Font Reserve 3.1.3 has it's pros and cons. I'm not going to go into all of them because I don't want this article to scroll for 4 screens. Let's take a look at some of the most notable ones...
I like that Font Reserve's auto-activation plug-ins auto-activate fonts quickly in most of the major programs.
I dislike that the auto-activaction plug-ins deactivate fonts (when a document is closed) so slowly. |
I like that Font Reserve gives you a lot of information about the fonts handled by Font Reserve. The font search and filtering features are quite extensive.
I dislike that it gives you too much information about your fonts. At some point more is too much and I think Font Reserve passed that point. Too much filtering and/or search capabilities are counter productive.
I like the power of the browser.
I dislike that the program is broken into different modules to handle all of Font Reserve's capabilities. It's confusing. |
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I like that Font Reserve is so customizable. It fits a wide range of use case scenarios.
I dislike that there are so many preferences. I think that most of what people need in a professional font manager (use case scenarios) could be handled by 1/4 of the preferences or settings in Font Reserve.
I like that it shows me the whole character set of a font(s) if I want it to.
I dislike the preview browsing capability of Font Reserve. It doesn't let me see enough.
I like that it has a Classic Activator which activates and deactivates fonts in both Mac OS X and Classic applications
I dislike that Classic activation and deactivation doesn't always work (at least as well as I would like it to work).
I like that the program is fully scriptable. As someone who plays with AppleScript, I find that very valuable.
I dislike that Font Reserve does not have a good solution for removing damaged or duplicate fonts.
If you have a good (fairly clean) font library and you want a font manager that gives you the ability to configure your computer for a wide variety of use case scenarios, then this is a good product. It allows you to do what a good font management program should do -- to not have all of your fonts on at once -- using manual and auto-activation functionality. It's competitively priced. But unlike Suitcase it can be confusing.
If you have serious font problems and you need font cleaning and sorting as well as normal font management, then this program may come up a bit short for you.
All in all I like Font Reserve. All of the basic core functionality of a professional level font manager are covered, conceptually. Now all Extensis needs to do is to simplify the program a little and then add a good method for dealing with problematic and/or duplicate fonts. |
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Software Developer........................................Extensis
Current Version...............................................v3.1.3
License Type....................................................Commercial
Full Version Price............................................$99.95
Upgrade Version Price...................................$49.95
System Requirements.....................................Mac OS X 10.2.6 - 10.3.5
Type of Software.............................................font management
Font Geek Rating............................................4 out of 5 |
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Bottom Line Comparison: Font Reserve compares very closely to Suitcase which is also now made by Extensis. Of these two, I think Font Reserve is probably a little better. Close behind these two offerings from Extensis is Alsoft's MasterJuggler. All of these, in my opinion, are a great deal better than Apple's own Font Book. But none of these programs work as well as the most current version of Insider Software's FontAgent Pro.
For a more in-depth comparison please see the article named "Font Management Shoot Out" in the Font Management section of Font Geek. |
An Invitation To Extensis
To the good folks at Extensis... If you have a new release or a beta version of Font Reserve that you would like me to review (as well as any other literature) that addresses some of these problems, please contact me. I would be happy to try out any new release and post an updated review if warranted. |
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