Mac OS X has come with the ability to activate and deactivate Fonts on the fly since 10.5, when Font Book was introduced. Font Book allows a single user to manage their fonts easily. But many will find that managing fonts on a per-computer basis ends up not being enough. Which begs the question: who needs a font server? A very simplistic answer is any organization with more than 5 users working in a collaborative environment. This could be the creative print shops, editorial, motion graphics, advertising agencies and other creative environments. But corporate environments where font licensing and compliance is important are also great candidates.

Lack of font management is a cost center for many organizations. There is a loss of productivity every time a user has to manually add fonts when opening co-workers documents, or the cost of a job going out with the wrong version of a font. Some of the other benefits of fonts servers are separate font sets for different workgroups and isolating corrupt fonts to clean up large font libraries, along with quick searching and identification of fonts.

Font Management and Best Practices

Anyone who uses fonts for daily workflow needs font management. This could be a standalone product such as Suitcase Fusion or Font Agent Pro. But larger environments invariably need to collaborate and share fonts between users, meaning many environments need font servers. Two such products include Extensis Universal Type Server and Font Agent Pro Server. But before adding font management products, users should clean up and any fonts loaded or installed and added prior to moving to a managed font environment. Places to look for fonts when cleaning them up include the following:

• ~/Library/Fonts
• /Library/Fonts
• /System/Library Fonts

Leaving any necessary system, Microsoft Web Core, and required Adobe fonts. The best resource for this process can be found at Extensis Font Best Practices in OX v.7, which can be found at: http://www.extensis.com/en/downloads/document_download.jsp?docId=5600039

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