It’s no secret that I’ve been a huge fan of Extensis Suitcase Fusion for many years. In fact, I’ve never veered away from it for my font management needs since the days of Mac OS 9 on my PPC Macs. Recently I was asked by the folks at Linotype/Monotype to take a look at FontExplorer X Pro 3. I had no interest in switching font managers but I figured what the heck, I’ll give it a try.What started with admiring the very slick icon, ended up being complete surprise to me, and a shift in my thinking about my preferred font management app of choice.
FontExplorer X Pro 3 (I’ll call it FEX from this point forward) isn’t the “mostly glitz and little guts” type of alternative application you run into when trying to replace a big-name app. FEX is stable, fast, intuitive, and actually works as advertised. After about an hour of use, I began to think “this is nice, but at some point today this thing is going to do something to tick me off.” FEX never did.
FontExplorer X Pro's main window contains exactly what you would expect in a font manager
The main window of FEX is much like any other font manager, listing your fonts and font sets in a column on the left, with a preview of fonts on the right. And like other font managers, FEX allows you to create groups of fonts you use frequently, add tags to your fonts for easy searching, get more in-depth info about your fonts, and set up custom type previews of selected fonts. Being a Suitcase Fusion user, I felt right at home in FEX. (more…)