![]() Special note for those of us working in OSX 10.5 (Leopard) - Apple has made it virtually impossible to remove some of the ‘Helvetica’ fonts from their system library – meaning you’ll either have to use Apple’s versions in your documents (NOOOOO!!!), or disable them by mucking around deep within your system files. ![]() A new feature (Suitcase had this since when, forever?) that *did* surface in my testing was a ‘conflict resolver’ tool, which alerts you with a pop-up window if you’ve got multiple fonts butting heads with each other in your document. * Smart Activation Opens the Fonts You Need : Insider’s web site has the following on this: “Open documents and watch FontSavant™ auto-activate the precise fonts you need, or use MagicMatch™ artificial intelligence to rank and suggest alternatives.” I haven’t seen anything explicitly labeled as ‘FontSavant’ or ‘MagicMatch’, but the application did a nice job all the same of activating everything I needed in InDesign & Photoshop CS3. Needless to say I’m sort of in the dark on the whole purpose of including this property in the menu. However a new feature of note in this area is the ability to sort your fonts (using a drop-down menu) by slant, proportion, weight, font format, and ‘comment’ – although I can’t actually view the comments anywhere in the main application panel - for that I’d have to right-click and select ‘get info’ on a typeface. The new icons are nice, though, and the whole app did get a nice refresh from the previous version’s ‘pinstriped’ look which was very ‘Jaguar-esque’. ![]() * New User Interface Provides Easy Font Access : I’m not sure that the new interface makes accessing fonts ‘easier’, but then again I’m an original FAP user so I’ve always found their interface to be quite simple to get around in. Now that FAP creates the WYSIWYG images beforehand, it makes for a *very* noticeable difference in smoothness and speed when viewing your fonts this way. In the past FAP created these previews on the fly, and it would slow the program to a dead crawl while you scrolled through your library. What this means is that while you’re going back to work on your file, FontAgent is compiling a slew of data about the fonts you just imported – things like the degree of the slant of your italic (or oblique) fonts, proportion, and the weight of the individual faces as compared to the ‘roman’ or default fonts in the family: What FAP4 also does during this process is to create an image preview file of what each typeface looks like when you turn on the ‘WYSIWYG’ option above the library listing in the main panel. Let’s run down the new stuff as Inside Software displays it on their web site, shall we? (my comments & screenshots following): * More Font Data than Ever : I immediately noticed that FAP – after importing a batch of new fonts – ran a process in the background called ‘profiling’. For those of you who’ve managed your font library with some earlier version of the program already, FAP4 doesn’t necessarily reinvent the wheel – it does, however, tack on some spiffy new features and makes auto-activation that much more reliable.
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