I was messing with my font collection so I could check out Extensis’ Suitcase X1 (pronounced “eleven”). I ended up moving so much fonts around that I wanted to start from scratch.

Stupid me, I even deleted fonts from my /System/Library/Fonts folder. But not because I had a death wish. I already had copied the said fonts somewhere and just wanted to do some sort of a “clean install” of them.

The bad part was I couldn’t copy the fonts back. Permission errors abound (which weren’t really permission related) Suddenly my menubar acted weird, apps started crashing (probably because they couldn’t render the system fonts (because they were erased).

I had no choice but to reboot… but on reboot, I couldn’t get into any GUI… I was thrown into the Darwin commandline. Sweat proceeded to pour down my forehead as I was thinking that I may just end up like Joel and his Archive and Install adventure… which I didn’t have time for.

Luckily, after some ls rm and cp-ing, I was able to do all the operations via commandline. And boy was I glad that the old school in me prevented me from giving up too early. I deleted all traces of fonts in the /System/Library/Fonts folder, and promptly copied the [hidden] font files I took from my restore disk. Then rebooted.

It was a joyous occasion when I saw the graphical login screen. Now I’m back in business.

The lesson here? Sometimes you have to look at things in black and white to actually get things done. hehehehe. viva commandline!

Anyways, back to the topic

The title says Extensis Suitcase X1, and you guessed it. I’ve been using it quite a lot recently for the projects/sidelines I’ve been doing. After fixing my Powerbook, my font collection as far as the OS itself is down to a minimum. Everything else is in my Document Folder.

As you have more and more “installed” fonts, they eat away at your memory. But if you keep a few installed, then your creativity is stifled. So font-management applications are there to serve as middlemen; loading fonts only when you need them.

OSX’s Font-Book provides rudimentary font management. It scans the fonts in the user, local, and system font directories, and allows you to enable or disable any font you choose. Which serves it’s purpose… but what if you’re a control freak and do not like your fonts in those system directories… besides, you only use them rarely. That is what these applications cater to. You can keep your fonts anywhere you’d like. Loading them to X1 isn’t moving them anywhere, but just indexing them so X1 can say ok dude, you got these fonts at these places, and you can activate them anytime via my central interface – you don’t have to worry about a think as I know where to look for them.

It has now proven to be an invaluable work tool for me.