Fontcase Brings Elegant Font Management To The Mac

Fontcase by Bohemian Coding, is easily one of the best font managers for the Mac and with no doubts the most elegant and beautifully designed.

The app has just got the most requested feature in its new version 1.5: auto-activation of fonts. Simply put, auto-activation allows you to install a small number of fonts on your system, the ones that you use the most; whenever a program needs a different font, the font manager automatically installs the font of the fly, and removes it when it is no longer needed.

The new version, a free upgrade for existing customers, was released on March 12. As for all major competitors, which have had this feature for a while, the auto activation works in all applications, including Adobe CS3 and CS4 suites.

The new version of the program adds other interesting features:

• Detection of duplicates: Fontcase detects if a font is installed in multiple places on a machine, and allows the user to fix the problem;
• Automatic import: fonts installed in the system are now automatically imported in the program;
• Easy vault relocation: Fontcase stores all fonts in a specific place, called Font Vault; this version allows the users to relocate the vault wherever they want;
• Easy backup: the Font Vault can be easily exported and backed up incrementally;
• General optimizations: cache compression and other improvements allow the application to run faster while using less resources.

I have played around with the new version and it is much snappier and faster than the previous one. I could not manage a crash yet.

I am not a design professional, and this is what I look for in a font manager:

• The ability to quickly compare several fonts to select the best one for a project;
• Ease of use;
• A good integration with the system;
• Safe storage and backup of my fonts.

What I want in an app is for it to be sufficiently beautiful and elegant for me to actually want go back to it. Fontcase is all of this.