OT: Recommendation for best Font Management on OSX Catalina

Design
1

Hi,

I’m a long time user of FontExplorer X Pro but am still currently using v5.

After upgrading to Catalina it seems like this no longer works and I must upgrade, for around €200.

I don’t mind paying this if it is still the best option, but thought I’d take the opportunity to see if there might be better options.

Any recommendations very much appreciated!

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They have a free trial version for it. Download it and give it a test run for 30 days.

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Thanks, yes it’s a good idea.

I was also interested in some other software though, Rightfont App in particular and how it compares.

Really, was just wondering if others had good/bad experiences using them.

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I’m still using FontExplorer X Pro 6 and it’s probably the single most wanted-to-get-rid-of app in my machine. So bloated and annoying with the promotion of (personally unwanted) plugins. I laughed when I saw their version 7 (released in October 2019) new features include “Unicode® 9 Support” (Unicode 9.0 was released in June 2016; Unicode was well into 12.1 when they prepared for FE 7.0). Certainly doesn’t look like a product with a promising future to invest your hundreds of euros.

RightFont’s website looks neat. Thanks for pointing to it. Gonna try it out.

2 Likes
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You’re welcome.

fwiw there is a free trail period for Rightfont which I am testing now and so far it seems really nice.

I even asked a question to their tech support about system fonts and they have responded within a day.

1 Like
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RightFont looks interesting at first glance, but it seems less powerful than FontExplorer. But am I right in saying that you can’t preview a font unless it’s activated? I’m staring at a long list of Bodoni fonts all beautifully rendered in a grey sans serif…

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I don’t think that is correct, no.

For example this weight of the font is not activated, but you can still preview.

Only the green (or magenta) ticks are the activated fonts (Regular and Medium)

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Having said that, I have seen the grey sans-serif you speak of but it seems only for fonts with limited sets of glyphs—maybe try right-clicking ‘Glyphs’ or cmd-y to see which characters should be viewable.

Having said this I am very new to the software and am sure it is less powerful in comparison to FontExplorer.

So far though, it seems to do everything I need pretty efficiently. I like the way auto-activation in most apps I use works, for example.