Between a review and a rant: Macware fonts
I love fonts. I *really* love fonts. I have a lot of them, collected over many years, which means that half the time I do not know where they come from or what kind of licence they have. Nor do most of them have the basic set of regular, italic, bold, and boldItalic.
The other day an offer rolled up in my inbox: 2000 commercial fonts, including a font management tool, for £7,50. That's a damn nice price, and after viewing some examples, I felt it was worth adding a few more fonts to my collection.
And I did. 296 fonts, to be precise. I cannot quibble with the semantics - 'font' can very well mean 'font face' and thus the set of variations - condensed, extended, black, outline (etc etc) - is fulfilling the letter of the law. However, I still feel that I've only had <300 'new fonts'.
Let me say that they appear to be well-designed typefaces; they seem to have the full set of auxiliary characters (which so often makes or breaks a font); they *do* have a commercial licence, and compared to Adobe's prices, they are laughably cheap.
(A proper designer might be well able to spot things wrong with them that I can't. I haven't, for instance, checked whether they contain ligatures, or *really* looked at the kerning. But the first and second impression is that these are at the very least nice, competent fonts; they are suited to the kinds of projects I want to do.)
I'm especially keen that there seem to be a number of sans serif fonts in this collection that I do not hate; so far my list stands at Optima. (Lucida Grande I used to love, but it has a conflict with one of the system fonts and does not display properly on my system, and I no longer own software that can change a font's unique ID, however that is implemented under OSX. Grrrr.).
However. As far as I can make out, while most of them have interesting variants, most of which I rarely use, like black and extended), they don't have boldItalic versions. And while it's rare that one of my texts uses both bold and italic, I'd expect that as part of the _basic_ set. Condensed etc. variants are bonuses that I *don't* need (and ones that I feel merit paying extra; the basic text versions are ones that I do.
Given this, I'm glad I did not pay full price, and quintuply glad I've never in my life considered the $300 price tag for the "6,200" fonts the same company sells.
Having thousands of fonts on my hard drive means that I am still looking for a good font management tool. (I have a vision what it will look like; but my programming skills are not there yet.) In the meantime, I try to make do, and another font management tool did not go amiss.
Hoh-hum. It's not the worst Mac App I've seen recently, but it pretty much stinks. For a company that calls itself 'MacSomething' and which exclusively ships Mac content, it looks like a cheap port. They haven't read the Mac Interface Design Guidelines (or any), grouping things willy-nilly which does not make it easier to use. Never before in almost twenty-four years of computing have I been asked to type 'I Agree' when performing a common though possibly undesirable action. (Selecting 'all fonts' which is more fonts than you should have on a Mac at any one time.) Has no-one ever told the programmers that unselecting a lot of unrelated elements is best performed by 'select all' followed by 'unselect all'?
And - hurray - it will export selected fonts to new folders, but in the process, it completely mangles the name, rendering it as _name#@#name_, which... did you not test your application? At all? Ever?
There are dozens of small niggles about the interface. It all feels like something thrown together by someone who wasn't really invested in this whole programming thing. Which wasn't the impression I'd gotten from other products this company has put out, but which now makes me doubt them a lot more.
The 'copy all fonts tucked away in subfolders into one folder' and 'copy all selected fonts into a folder so I can look only at regular typefaces without having to wade through all of them' features are still useful, because they speed up my workflow, but oh, my, am I ever taking notes of things wot don't work...
Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1029951.html where it has gathered
comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.
The other day an offer rolled up in my inbox: 2000 commercial fonts, including a font management tool, for £7,50. That's a damn nice price, and after viewing some examples, I felt it was worth adding a few more fonts to my collection.
And I did. 296 fonts, to be precise. I cannot quibble with the semantics - 'font' can very well mean 'font face' and thus the set of variations - condensed, extended, black, outline (etc etc) - is fulfilling the letter of the law. However, I still feel that I've only had <300 'new fonts'.
Let me say that they appear to be well-designed typefaces; they seem to have the full set of auxiliary characters (which so often makes or breaks a font); they *do* have a commercial licence, and compared to Adobe's prices, they are laughably cheap.
(A proper designer might be well able to spot things wrong with them that I can't. I haven't, for instance, checked whether they contain ligatures, or *really* looked at the kerning. But the first and second impression is that these are at the very least nice, competent fonts; they are suited to the kinds of projects I want to do.)
I'm especially keen that there seem to be a number of sans serif fonts in this collection that I do not hate; so far my list stands at Optima. (Lucida Grande I used to love, but it has a conflict with one of the system fonts and does not display properly on my system, and I no longer own software that can change a font's unique ID, however that is implemented under OSX. Grrrr.).
However. As far as I can make out, while most of them have interesting variants, most of which I rarely use, like black and extended), they don't have boldItalic versions. And while it's rare that one of my texts uses both bold and italic, I'd expect that as part of the _basic_ set. Condensed etc. variants are bonuses that I *don't* need (and ones that I feel merit paying extra; the basic text versions are ones that I do.
Given this, I'm glad I did not pay full price, and quintuply glad I've never in my life considered the $300 price tag for the "6,200" fonts the same company sells.
Having thousands of fonts on my hard drive means that I am still looking for a good font management tool. (I have a vision what it will look like; but my programming skills are not there yet.) In the meantime, I try to make do, and another font management tool did not go amiss.
Hoh-hum. It's not the worst Mac App I've seen recently, but it pretty much stinks. For a company that calls itself 'MacSomething' and which exclusively ships Mac content, it looks like a cheap port. They haven't read the Mac Interface Design Guidelines (or any), grouping things willy-nilly which does not make it easier to use. Never before in almost twenty-four years of computing have I been asked to type 'I Agree' when performing a common though possibly undesirable action. (Selecting 'all fonts' which is more fonts than you should have on a Mac at any one time.) Has no-one ever told the programmers that unselecting a lot of unrelated elements is best performed by 'select all' followed by 'unselect all'?
And - hurray - it will export selected fonts to new folders, but in the process, it completely mangles the name, rendering it as _name#@#name_, which... did you not test your application? At all? Ever?
There are dozens of small niggles about the interface. It all feels like something thrown together by someone who wasn't really invested in this whole programming thing. Which wasn't the impression I'd gotten from other products this company has put out, but which now makes me doubt them a lot more.
The 'copy all fonts tucked away in subfolders into one folder' and 'copy all selected fonts into a folder so I can look only at regular typefaces without having to wade through all of them' features are still useful, because they speed up my workflow, but oh, my, am I ever taking notes of things wot don't work...
Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1029951.html where it has gathered
comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.