Because it’s by far my favorite font manager, and because I only want to see it improve, I’m throwing up this page, which I will keep up to date, to document the bugs I’ve found in Insider Software’s FontAgent Pro. It has just enough issues to be maddening, especially when I consider how close it is to being just right. It still looks brilliant when set next to FontReserve or Suitcase, neither of which Extensis seems to be very interested in developing. If you have FontAgent bugs of your own, leave them as comments or Trackbacks, and periodically I’ll poke Insider to see what they’re up to.
Here’s an easy reference to the list of bugs. Bug numbers are allocated as bugs are assigned, and may not reflect their order on this page:
The FontAgent setup assistant does exactly the wrong thing by default.
Bug fap010: People with a lot of fonts typically spend a lot of time organizing them. Me too. When I recently reorganized my fonts and removed all the ones that were unlicensed, I created a set of folders to organize everything, placing all of my fonts in a carefully organized structure. I would have been really pissed if I’d assumed that FontAgent Pro would respect that structure and not just rampantly suck in every font on my system, which is what its setup assistant is configured to do by default. Like iTunes or iPhoto, FontAgent wants to keep all of the assets it manages in one place, where it can keep an eye on them. Also like iTunes, your first encounter with this behavior can be shocking and unpleasant if you’re not expecting it.
FontAgent can be configured to either move the fonts on your system into its repository, to make copies of the fonts in its repository, or to not import any fonts at all. Right now it does the first by default, which has been surprised and dismayed countless users new to FontAgent. I would argue that the third choice should be the default, because arbitrarily placing every font on your system into a single library can cause performance problems later on (see below), and FontAgent works best when you add fonts in small batches, checking after each import to make sure that everything’s proceeding smoothly.
Furthermore, when you drag fonts into FontAgent to import them, the default should always be to copy the fonts rather than move them. Disk space is cheap, and if we want to get rid of the fonts we’re importing, we’ll delete them ourselves. I think unexpectedly moving around users’ fonts has done the most to damage its acceptance among people who would love it if it weren’t making such a disastrous first impression. And yes, this behavior is documented, but people running the demo can’t be counted upon to read the manual.
Status: outstanding as of FontAgent Pro 3.0.2
Sometimes importing and then activating fonts causes FontAgent Pro to crash.
Bug fap001: This isn’t easily reproducible, but it’s happened frequently enough for me to have spotted the pattern: on occasion, when I attempt to activate a newly-imported font immediately after the import process has completed, FontAgent Pro will crash. The FontAgent Activator continues to run, and I can restart the browser with no apparent problems.
2005/05/04 UPDATE: A little more experimentation leads me to believe that if you install a bunch of new fonts and FontAgent Pro has to populate the cache it uses to generate type images, it can exercise a bug in the guts of the browser that will cause it to spontaneoulsy quit (I would say “crash”, except I don’t get a Crash Reporter dialog out of the exercise). This is still hard to reproduce, because once fonts are cached you have to delete and recreate your FontAgent installation to clear them (without possibly exercising other bugs), but I’ve been adding a bunch of fonts over the last few days and the browser has been acting a little crash-happy. As mentioned above, you can just reload the browser and continue on your way.
Status: outstanding as of FontAgent Pro 3.0.2.
FontAgent Pro scales poorly.
Bug fap002: As discussed elsewhere, until fairly recently I was a gigantic font whore. I had a collection of over 20,000 fonts I’d acquired over the years (many of which were badly corrupt). They’d all been managed in FontReserve and Suitcase over the years, and neither of those programs do a very good job of dealing with corrupt fonts, so I thought importing the whole collection into FontAgent Pro would be a good test of its capabilities. It performed admirably, weeding out thousands of bunk fonts and only taking about two days to process them all (I’m not exaggerating – the process was very time-consuming). Unfortunately, this turned FontAgent Pro into a big pig: login was very slow, the FontAgent Activator consumed over a hundred megabytes of active memory, and the browser was very sluggish.
Clearly, FontAgent Pro wasn’t designed to be used by avaricious font pirates, but I can see large design bureaus and prepress houses (arrr, matey!) amassing libraries of a similar size. Suitcase is more or less blithely indifferent, sucking equally rapidly regardless of its library size, and FontReserve is more or less as slow FontAgent Pro. I’d expect slowdown when lots of fonts were activated, but seeing that kind of speed drops when only the library is large was somewhat disappointing.
I’ve subsequently rebuilt my font library, purging all the unlicensed fonts from my system, and now that I have fewer than a thousand fonts in my library, FontAgent Pro runs quickly enough that I don’t notice its speed (although see below regarding font activation in Adobe applications).
Status: outstanding as of FontAgent Pro 3.0.2.
FontAgent Pro improperly handles bitmap suitcase files containing multiple styles for a single font family.
Bug fap003: The original fonts for the Macintosh were bitmap fonts, or fonts where the characters are represented as black and white images rather than described mathematically by curves. Each font had a range of font sizes, attributes (such as a name, an ID (which was supposed to be unique but inevitably ended up conflicting with other fonts – probably the single largest factor that led to the development of font managers in the first place), a style (regular, italic, bold, bold italic), and font metrics), and were bundled into a special kind of file called a suitcase. You moved fonts between suitcases (and into the System file, which is how you made fonts available to the OS) using a little program called Font/DA Mover (which was made obsolete by System 7, because it allowed you to browse suitcases and the System file directly in the Finder). Adobe and Apple piggybacked on this technology when they made PostScript fonts available on the Mac, adding only the notion of a “PostScript name” in the font description, so the system could match PostScript font files with bitmap fonts kept in suitcases.
Mac OS X still uses a vestigial version of the font suitcase for Postscript Type 1 fonts, which is mostly there to provide font metrics and some name information. The general practice, which FontAgent Pro tries to follow, is to have one font style per suitcase, so each Type 1 font is paired with its dingleberry of a screen font.
I don’t know why, but when I import some font families into FontAgent Pro, the individual font styles aren’t stripped out of the suitcase into their own screen font files. These are fonts that work fine if I just place them in the Mac OS X Library/Fonts directories. This seems to happen most frequently with font families that follow the traditional conventions of coming in regular, italic, bold, and bold italic styles. Frequently, I’ll see only the regular style listed in the FontAgent browser, and often, when I click on that style, no preview will display in either the Font Player or Font Compare panes. Irritatingly enough, sometimes the regular style will be unavailable in Mac OS X applications, while the other three are perfectly fine.
Status: outstanding as of FontAgent Pro 3.0.2.
Bug fap004: There’s a further knock-on effect, which I think is related: when I go to delete fonts from the library in the FontAgent browser, only the font suitcase (which, remember, contains screen fonts for all four styles of the Type 1 font) and the regular style of the Type 1 font get deleted. The other Type 1 files are left hanging around, causing FontAgent Pro to complain about missing screen fonts on subsequent imports. My workaround for now is to go in and delete the (un)affected Type 1 files from the library by hand.
Status: outstanding as of FontAgent Pro 3.0.2.
Bug fap005: Lastly, I have at least one font family where there were originally two suitcases containing the same style of the same font, which FontAgent should have noticed as duplicates and removed, but didn’t (one suitcase contained the regular and italic styles of the family, the other contained expert and alternate characters but contained screen fonts for the regular and italic as well). In this case, the presence of the duplicate screen fonts in the suitcase led to FontAgent Pro complaining about duplicate screen fonts upon subsequent imports. Bafflingly enough, eventually this problem fixed itself with the affected family, but it sure was annoying until it did.
Status: outstanding as of FontAgent Pro 3.0.2.
Sometimes FontAgent forgets which fonts are manually activated across restarts.
Bug fap011: I haven’t figured out why, but sometimes FontAgent loses track of which fonts I had manually activated, even though I have “Reactivate manually activated fonts” checked in the Preferences. This behavior appears to have been remedied by making liberal use of Startup Sets, but it shouldn’t have surfaced in the first place.
Status: outstanding as of FontAgent Pro 3.0.2.
The FontAgent activation plugins can’t keep up with Adobe applications.
Bug fap006: I’ve seen this documented a number of places, so I’ll keep the description brief. When you open a document containing inactive fonts inside Illustrator or InDesign, the inactive fonts will start activating, but sometimes the Adobe application will complain first that necessary fonts aren’t available, and the affected fonts in the document will be replaced with the highlighted “default font”. The fix for this is simple: close the newly-opened document without saving and open it again. All of the newly-activated fonts will be in effect.
Status: outstanding as of FontAgent Pro 3.0.2.
Fonts don’t preview properly after being activated and then deactivated in the browser.
Bug fap007: The bug comes out of the description of reproducing it, so I’ll just describe how I reproduce it. In the FontAgent browser, select a deactivated font. In the Font Compare pane, it will show a preview of the selected font (most of the time – see above). Activate the font, and it will briefly display the preview text as Lucida Grande (as it swaps out the cached version of the font character images FontAgent uses for previewing for the actual, “live” version of the font), and then it will return to a preview of the font (this repeated switch between fonts is a bug on its own, but it doesn’t bother me). Now deactivate the font. It will again briefly display as Lucida Grande, but instead of being the font to be previewed, on my system it always gets replaced with Helvetica. If I activate and deactivate multiple fonts, all of them end up being Helvetica. Switching between Font Player and Font Compare doesn’t fix the display; I have to quit and restart the browser.
Status: outstanding as of FontAgent Pro 3.0.2.
Fonts display with incorrect baseline height when first selected immediately after starting the browser.
Bug fap008: Pretty simple and display-only, but annoying. It appears that upon launch, the browser’s Font Compare pane assumes the font height is set at 12 when you start up, even if the value in the field is higher (in my case, it’s almost always 48). As a result, the banner with the name, size, and type of the font cuts off about half of the font preview. Changing the preview size causes everything to fix itself.
Sometimes working fonts get broken by import due to naming problems.
Bug fap009: To put a tiny little bit of typographic relief in the sere, desert plain that is this posting, I’ll put out there that I really like old “Egyptian” slab serif typefaces. I went through a little bakeoff of a number of them recently, and licensed copies of Linotype’s version of Clarendon, František Storm’s loopy Farao (not as loopy as Mac Rhino’s totally girly Oxtail, but loopy nonetheless), Bauer’s Volta, and Wooden Type Fonts’ portly Antique No. 6. It was the last that caused FontAgent to barf: even though the font would work just fine when put into my ~/Library/Fonts directory, when I try to import it into FontAgent, the browser finds “1 Missing Postscript Font” and “1 Missing Screen Font” instead of the font I’m trying to import. I think this is because FontAgent is slightly pickier about font naming conventions than Mac OS X; in any case, my workaround for now is to simply keep the font in my ~/Library/Fonts folder, where it can’t be managed but can be used.
Status: outstanding as of FontAgent Pro 3.0.2.
Insider’s release notes suck.
Bug fap666: Sometime in the last two or three days (as of 2003/05/03), Insider released version 3.0.1 of FontAgent Pro. What does it fix? Does it have any new features? Who knows! There are no release notes distributed with the app, there’s nothing on the FontAgent website, and there’s not even any useful information on VersionTracker. MacUpdate has a one-sentence blurb about how this version offers Bonjour (née Rendezvous) support for font-sharing, which was probably just a name change to keep people from getting confused. Release notes generally are much better for open source software than for commercial, but even so, it took me over a week to figure out what had changed between 2.x and 3.0. It worked in Insider’s favor, because I downloaded the new version immediately to see if it fixed any of my bugs (it didn’t).
Status: outstanding as of FontAgent Pro 3.0.2.
2005/05/04 UPDATE 01: At Stephen’s suggestion, I’ve added bug numbers to each of the bugs, as well as a quick-reference list of bugs at the top. Good idea, Stephen!
2005/05/04 UPDATE 02: Paul brings to my attention FontAgent Pro’s completely lame defaults during the initialization process, which didn’t cause me problems only because I had previously used Font Reserve, which is similarly badly behaved.
2005/05/05 UPDATE: I received a very nice call yesterday from FontAgent’s product manager, Benjamin Levasay. Benjamin is a recent hire at Insider Software who previously showed his font-management mettle in running the excellent and aptly-named Font Geek, pretty much the best site out there discussing font management on the Mac. I referred to it constantly when I was putting together my own font-management setup. He said that they were aware of many of the issues on my list and would discuss the rest. He left me feeling like Insider is committed to improving FontAgent, which I should be able to take for granted, but really can’t given the state of font management apps on the Mac. Our conversation was pleasant, and I really appreciate him taking the time to contact me directly. Thanks, Benjamin!
2005/05/06 UPDATE: I added an annoying but trivial bug related to FontAgent forgetting about manually activated fonts. I’m investigating some bugs and quirks reported by lettertiep below.
2005/06/20 UPDATE: FontAgent Pro has been updated to 3.0.2 as of 2005/06/02. As far as anyone seems to be able to tell, the only changes are related to support for Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”. Version numbers have been updated and bugs revalidated.