I’ve been a user of Extensis’ Suitcase software to manage my fonts for many years and was a bit disappointed when I upgraded to Adobe CS4 and the auto activate plug in for Illustrator and InDesign was not upgraded in Suitcase 11.
Yesterday’s Layers Tip of the Day mentioned that Suitcase Fusion 2 has a new auto-active plug ins for CS4 and was very pleased to find that it is available for Windows users too! (Extensis Website)
Suitcase Fusion 2 requires that you uninstall Suitcase 11 before installing. It also does not automatically retrieve the Suitcase 11 database.. You can load the Suitcase 11 database by going to Tools > Import Suitcase for Windows Data
Note: Fusion 2’s default settings move all added fonts to a "font vault" within Local, Application Data of your C:/ drive. If you are like me with a lot of fonts, duplicating all of those somewhere else on your system is a bit crazy – I have all of mine stored in F:/fonts/ the items in the F drive do not change very often so it doesn’t have to backed up as frequently – rather convenient for my work flow. To change this setting go to: Edit > Preferences and under Font Vault Options change to "Add fonts leaving them in place." I also changed the Activations Options adding a check into "Notify if a conflict occurs."
That said – it seems that if you ‘Import Suitcase for Windows Data’ it goes to the vault vice leaving them so I ended up creating new sets. Something new and coinvent with Fusion 2 is you can "export sets" which are mini database files… to save sets/back them up.
You can also have multiple libraries… I now have a library for my standard fonts and another for various free fonts…
Other cool features include the ability to create popup boxes of fonts you are considering and being able to move fonts to sets from the preview window..
All in all a great upgrade… that took too long in the making!
