Fontcase 2 brings UI overhaul, Typedia integration
updated 05:55 pm EDT, Wed May 4, 2011
Includes Typesetter, a new font preview tool
Fontcase, a Apple Design Award-winning font manager from Bohemian Coding, has been upgraded to version 2.0, bringing with it a major re-design of the user interface, Typedia integration and a new method of previewing fonts the company calls Typesetter. Fontcase focuses on metadata, allowing users to assign tags, genres and other info like designer and foundry, or let the Typedia integration fill all that in automatically. The program features strong comparing tools to let users compare fonts and has been improved over the previous version in speed and performance.
The Typesetter feature gives users an opportunity to "try out" different font combinations on an actual design to see which fonts will work together best. Users can open an HTML or web page (or just some text) in the Typesetter window and then drag in different fonts. The selected text is then changed to that font so that designers can see how it will look without affecting the actual document.
Fontcase previews fonts in three different views -- a "Display" view with a simple line of text, a "Body" view showing several paragraphs, and a "Glyph" view where the glyphs contained in a given font can be quickly previewed. An iOS companion app called Fontcase Viewer ($1) can be used to work as a viewer for the Mac software. The Mac app will automatically send high-resolution previews of a font to the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.
As part of the UI overhaul, the company have done away with the Sourcelist and made browsing tags and genres easier, and incorporated an iPhoto-like skimming ability for genres, families and collections of fonts. The developer, Peter Omvlee, has also promised that the new version will support full-screen mode in Lion when it is released. Like most other font managers, Fontcase also offers auto-activation of fonts as needed, and stores fonts in its own vault which can be transferred to other Macs.
Fontcase v2 is exclusively available through the Mac App Store and for a limited time is priced at $29. It requires Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later, and specifically a 64-bit Intel processor (ie, Core2Duo or later only). A trial version is available from the developer's website.
