Lucid Nonsense


Font Management

Thursday, 14 May 2009

My favourite font manager for the past few years has been FontExplorer X from Linotype. The software was fast, easy to use, reliable and had a big advantage in being completely free. Styled in a way very reminiscent of iTunes the interface was sensible and familiar for users.

Sadly it looks like Linotype’s inclusion of a font store in FontExplorer X (FEX) hasn’t balanced the books, and the new release, FontExplorer X Pro, is now a £59 ex VAT purchase. This is a roughly comparable price to alternatives such as Suitcase Fusion 2 and I do think FEX is a much better product, but it’s certainly lost one big advantage it had over it’s competitors. It does seem like a good upgrade to FEX in general though, and as a bonus Linotype have kindly left the previous free version available on their downloads page, so I can’t complain too much.

One interesting addition that has been introduced at the same time is FontExplorer X Server. I’m going to be testing a demo of that over the next few weeks. Sadly, and in common with Extensis’ UTS, the smallest license available for FEX Server is for 10 users. This doesn’t make it cheap for small businesses which is frustrating as there are a lot of 5-person design studios who could really benefit from a decent font server, but the £1500+ prices generally make them stick with individual font clients. The price itself is almost exactly the same as UTS, which does suggest that Linotype have specifically targeted FEX Server as a direct competitor to the Extensis product. Certainly in my opinion if you compare the companies respective font client software I have to think that Linotype are in with a very good shout of having the better font server. The person I spoke to from the UK distributor for Linotype certainly sounded very confident when I mentioned that we had used UTS in the past. I will post some conclusions when I’ve had the chance to give the demo a proper run.


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