It’s not an especially scintillating topic, unless you’re a designer or art director who spends too many hours of every day frustrated by fonts and font management software that aren’t working.

At SVC, we’ve touched on the topic of font management for design through a series of free talks presented by our very good friends and neighbors at CreativeTechs, Seattle’s provider of left brain support for right brain professionals.

At these free talks, Craig Swanson, CreativeTechs’ founder, felt that he could never do justice to the topic of font management software in the 60 minutes alloted. So, he took it upon himself to do some testing and write an authoritative piece on this vital subject.

We’ve included his conclusions below, but it’s well worth looking over the entire report. Happy font-problem-free reading.

“What is the best font manager for Mac OS X?”

Your particular answer depends a lot on the type of work you do and your particular interface preferences. At CreativeTechs we recommend and support all four of these choices depending on a client’s needs. I see it as my job here to provide information rather than giving a solid recommendation.

For what they are worth, here are my thoughts when recommending a particular choice to our own clients:

The Industry Standard: Extensis Suitcase

A majority (80%+) of our clients manage their fonts with Extensis Suitcase. From talking with consultants in other parts of the country, that is the case elsewhere. Suitcase was one of the early major font managers for designers switching to Mac OS X. There was security of a well-known company behind it.

To be fair, consulting firms (like CreativeTechs) help perpetuate Suitcase’s dominance. Most of our clients use Suitcase — therefore we are more experienced supporting Suitcase. That becomes a self-enforcing pattern. Suitcase becomes the safe, known choice.

If you have a large, clean font collection, Suitcase is a good safe choice as a font manager. Suitcase Fusion is a big improvement over the previous versions.

Note: Suitcase has a sizable contingent of detractors. I do find that most people who complain about Suitcase instabilities are often dealing with messy and corrupt font libraries. This is why I usually include the disclaimer that Suitcase is a good choice for clean font collections.

The Contender: FontAgent Pro.

I am coming around to FontAgent Pro’s strengths. I’ve long admired FontAgent’s strength in cleaning and organizing messy font collections (not a focus of this particular shoot out). I’ve used it in this role many times. I’m also quite intrigued with what I’ve seen in FontAgent’s network font sharing options.

I have not supported enough clients using FontAgent Pro to experience how stable it is in a wide variety of environments. This could be argued as my own limitation and not FontAgent Pro’s. It did perform quite well on our tests.

The designers I see choosing FontAgent tend to be more technically inclined on average. I would appreciate feedback from FontAgent users. tips@creativetechs.com.

The Clever New Kid: Linotype FontExplorer X

I have a lot of affection for FontExplorer X. This is the program that I currently use on my own personal workstation. There are dozens of great touches I think other font managers could learn from. Yet I can’t recommend it for most of my clients for two reasons:

#1: This is a brand new piece of software and there are still rough edges that need smoothing out. The auto-activation movie clips demonstrate some examples of these (and those tests were more successful than I was expecting).

#2: I need to see how committed Linotype is to maintaining and updating this program. The business model of increasing sales to Linotype’s font store may or may not work. If it doesn’t, will FontExplorer be dropped?

Time will tell for both. I don’t generally recommend FontExplorer for clients who bill for their time and don’t like troubleshooting. But for students (who will like that it is free), or techie folk (who like the occasional glitch) this is a great program with a lot of promise.

Better Than Nothing: Apple Font Book

We rarely use Font Book at our clients. It just does not perform well with large font collections (more than 100-200 families). Typically the places I use Font Book are companies where we’ve installed a small fixed set of fonts that don’t change much.

As new Macs get faster, Font Book’s troubles diminish slightly. Each time Apple releases a major update to Mac OS X, I race to throw a large font collection into Font Book. We’ll check again with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Someday we may recommend Font Book as a good font manager. Until that time, it remains a solution that is certainly better than nothing.