Review: FontExplorer X Pro 5
Font management is a fact of life for all creative professionals, and while the technical nuts-and-bolts of the process can be mind-numbingly complex, font management utilities also have features that are outrageously useful, educational, and fun. In this story, we’ll explore some designer-friendly features of Monotype’s FontExplorer X Pro that will get your inner font geek jumping up and down on your creative sofa.
FontExplorer Features
If you have a large font collection, the following features will be simultaneously relieving and invigorating. (Note: Monotype has a version of FontExplorer X Pro for Windows, but it doesn’t have the groovy features described below. If you want this level of font fun, you’ll need a Mac.)
No more duplicates or damaged fonts
By default, FontExplorer X Pro (FEX for short) copies your fonts into its archive, in the process eliminating duplicate and damaged fonts. That’s a huge relief right there.
The best type specimen printer
FEX can print type specimen (sample) pages, with an abundance of features for typophiles. This is one of the best implementations of font specimen printing I’ve encountered, and for some users would be valuable enough to justify buying the program. It includes the five most commonly used layouts for specimen pages, but you can also customize each area or design your own and share them with others. Optional headers and footers can contain page numbers and your own custom information and graphics.
Custom sets & Application sets
You can create custom Sets of fonts to activate all at once, as well as “Application Sets” that activate when a specific application launches.
Smart sets
You can define “smart” sets that automatically list any fonts meeting your specific requirements, such as font format, manufacturer, classification, designer, number of activations, embedding rights, label, rating, and so on. A Smart Set can also be used to show your recently activated fonts, recently imported fonts, fonts that support a specific language, or that employ specific OpenType features.
A quick, temporary set
Unique to FEX is the ability to create an “Ad hoc” set that you can add selected font(s) to with one keystroke (Command-+). This is helpful when you’re watching a slide show of possible fonts, or skimming through your font collection, and don’t want to be interrupted to create and name a set. Until you name that set, you can add additional selected fonts to it by pressing Command-+ again.
Add comments to a set
You can add Comments to sets to remember why you made them, or to educate other users about them. This feature is especially handy when using the Server version of FEX, because when users mouse over a Set, they see the comments added by the administrator.
Auto-activate fonts when opening documents
FEX can automatically activate fonts used in documents as you open them, including those from Adobe and Quark (including placed graphics), and keeps track of the fonts each application has requested for activation.
Detect fonts in unopened documents
FEX can list the fonts used in many kinds of documents without opening them, including RTF, PDF, EPS, SVG, InDesign, QuarkXPress, Pages and Keynote. It can then create a new Set from those fonts, activate them, and even let you purchase them if they’re not already in your library. It can also export a report of a document’s fonts in plain text or XML format.
Clean font caches
FEX can clean the font caches used by applications from Adobe, Quark and Microsoft, as well as by your Mac’s operating system. This is incredibly useful for designers who use multiple versions of a font — otherwise, applications may remember your previous version when you’re using a newer one.
Preview fonts as tiles or slide shows
A Font Tile view displays a few characters in each font, helping you find a font that has a specific flavor or to quickly scan for the best font for a logo.
FEX also lets you watch a slide show to flip through multiple fonts, and drag a sample over any area of your display — using your own text in any color, size, leading, tracking and so forth. This is incredibly handy for exploring headline options on a document you have open in any program. It will even show the slideshow as a transparent overlay on your documents.
Preview any text in any color
In the bottom preview panel, you can control the color of the preview, whether or not to use the font’s built-in kerning values in the preview, and apply your own tracking values. You can also edit or create phrases for the preview text, use various languages, see all the number characters in a font, the ligatures it includes, and special characters such as $, &, @, and curly quotes.
Share previews
You can share font previews with colleagues via e-mail, Message, Air Drop, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.
Web font support
While you can’t use web fonts on desktop documents, you can still use FEX to preview and organize them, including WOFF (Web Open Font Format) and EOT (Embedded OpenType) fonts.
Preview fonts on web pages
Most excitingly, you can preview any of your fonts (not just your web fonts) on any block of text on any web page, using FontExplorer’s built-in web browser. Just click a block of text on the web page and choose a new font, color, size and line height. FEX can even generate CSS code for the new fonts, and create a new set for them.
The all-seeing Info window
When you double-click a font, an Info window opens that provides every bit of information that can be known about the font. The Info window also lets you find, view and copy/paste any character in any font, including the latest emoji fonts. Helpfully, you can limit your search to specific languages, dingbats, punctuation, letterlike symbols, arrows, currency symbols, and other groupings.
How smart is that OpenType font?
The Info window’s OpenType options are especially handy for quickly seeing the intelligence built into an advanced OpenType font. For example, some fonts can automatically choose alternate characters based on their position in a word or sentence. Or, they may include special characters for small caps, fractions, subscripts and superscripts. These and other OpenType features can be instantly previewed on any text.
The almighty Character Toolbox
FEX’s Character Toolbox is tremendously powerful for multilingual publishing because it will show you if the glyphs (characters) that are important for your project are included in the fonts you want to use. For example, you could paste in some sample text from your project, or type in some eastern European characters or European punctuation to be sure your font has them. If you know the languages your project requires, but not the specific glyphs, you can simply check the list of Supported Languages for that font in the Character Toolbox.
When designing a book or other long document, it’s common to set a portion of it in each font you’re considering, to determine which fonts make the document longer or shorter. The Character Toolbox shows you how each selected font compares with your chosen “base” font for the project: for example, a long document set in Cambria will require approximately 5.1% fewer pages than the same document set in Arial.
Another Character Toolbox feature is valuable to designers of corporate identities: ink usage. Large corporations print untold reams of paper every day. Saving a few percentage points of ink or toner can make a huge impact on the total cost of printing. For example, using Cambria for corporate communications requires approximately 19.1% less ink or toner than using Arial.
Shrink the window
The FEX window is quite large, but a convenient Mini View option condenses it into a compact window, letting you activate and deactivate fonts and sets.
Manage rented fonts
Fonts from font rental services such as Adobe’s Typekit and Monotype’s SkyFonts are invisible on your computer (and therefore previously inaccessible to a font manager), but FEX can activate and deactivate fonts you’ve installed from these services. It even keeps track of Typekit fonts you’ve removed, so you can quickly download them again.
Directly buy fonts
FEX can link to your account at popular online stores such as Fonts.com, Monotype.com, MyFonts.com, and FontShop.com so you can quickly buy and activate fonts. And similar to iTunes, you can click the arrow next to a font’s name to see related fonts available for sale in the same font family.
It’s server savvy
A Server version can run on any computer, and is easily administered through FEX. You can set up users and groups with any combination of privileges. Fonts stored on the server are copied to local computers when activated, but not in a form that can be shared with others, and can be time-limited. And to help you stay in compliance with your font licenses, the Server will not distribute more copies of the font than you have a license for.
Back up and take it with you
FEX can also create a backup of your entire font setup, so you can copy it to another Mac.
Switching from another font manager
Switching from another font manager to FEX is easy too. You can import complete libraries, with structure, by simply dragging all the sets from inside Suitcase Fusion or FontAgent Pro into the Fonts area of FontExplorer.
Speaking of other font managers…
As mentioned at the top of this story, FontExplorer X Pro isn’t the only font manager with designer-friendly features. Insider Software’s FontAgent Pro and Extensis’ Suitcase Fusion both have features that FontExplorer doesn’t.
For example, Suitcase Fusion adds an “Extensis” font panel to Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator that lets you explore and apply any font in its library — even fonts you haven’t activated. Suitcase Fusion’s Fontspiration panel is filled with excellent examples of font art created by Extensis and other type experts — hover over one to see its designer and typefaces used, or click one to switch to your web browser and see a full-size version on its Pinterest board. Suitcase Fusion’s QuickComp feature lets you preview your fonts in dozens of common generic projects such as brochures, books, magazines, newspapers, smart phones, tablets, and web pages. You can explore, activate and download Google’s ever-growing collection of free fonts within Suitcase Fusion, and its QuickMatch feature lets you find Google fonts that look similar to any font you have. (More importantly, it lets you find fonts within your collection that look similar to each other.) And you can use Suitcase Fusion’s color picker to choose the text and background color for font samples—handy for when you want to drag out a font sample and have it match a client’s corporate brand colors.
See also: Suitcase Fusion 6 Review
The third major font manager, FontAgent Pro and is popular with designers for many reasons, including its simple interface and ability to share fonts with others in your workgroup. The Smart Search feature lets you search for any conceivable combination of font attributes. Font Classifier lets you browse fonts by category, such as Text Sans Serif, Text Serif, Display, Script, Art and Pi, and System. And the Keyword Search feature lets you use common terms such as Typewriter, Western, Retro, or Holiday to find matching fonts on your local hard drive or network, and it can even include commercial fonts available for sale.
Nobody’s perfect
In one way or another all font managers stumble when dealing with large font collections. It’s not necessarily the fault of the font manager, because fonts are notoriously squirrely — there are a thousand ways a font can be constructed improperly, and literally anyone can create and release a font. Fortunately, each font manager has built-in tools for discovering badly constructed fonts, but they can’t find every single problem. Categorizing fonts is also notoriously difficult, and these font managers won’t (or maybe can’t) categorize every font by style or best use. And speed can be an issue with large font collections or older computers—it’s always best to have the latest update to these managers because developers often release updates to improve the font manager’s speed.
Summary
FontExplorer X Pro boasts plenty of powerful features that make it well worth the price tag. If you harbor the slightest interest in nurturing your inner font geek, you’ll find that FontExplorer lives up to its name—helping you explore the vast world of fonts.
Rating: 8/10
Cost: $99 / Upgrades: $49
System requirements: Mac OS X v10.8 or higher, Microsoft Windows 7, 8 or higher
Great review…but what are some drawbacks specific to this app that you discovered? Thanks.
Eric: Well, this isn’t a problem unique to FontExplorer but when printing type samples of fonts that have tall ascenders they are sometimes cut off. For example, the big swashy ones like Adios Pro. I’ll keep your question in mind while using FEX over the next few days and if a problem rears its font-head, I’ll post back here again. Thanks for the question!
Great review, Jay! Looking forward to checking out the new version.
Thanks, Erica! It wasn’t intended as a review, but it somehow ended up that way. I had fun highlighting the features I thought designers would enjoy. There are just SO MANY features!
Readers should know FontExplorer Prooesn’t work on El Capitan Mac OS. Support has no solutions!
That’s odd! It’s working fine on our El Capitan Mac. What kinds of problems are you experiencing?