Lion gives good font

I finally buckled and upgraded to OS/X 10.7 Lion. After all, now that the first update is out, the major glitches should be gone right?

Overall I’m happy with the upgrade. There are some really nice usability improvements, in general I’d say performance is great, and some of the new features are really very handy.

Take, for instance, the new Font Book that ships with Lion. For years I’ve used, loved, and cursed Suitcase Fusion for managing my fonts. I’ve got about 800 or so that I’ve accumulated over the years — enough to pose a small organizational nightmare if not done well. Past version of OS/X have had no problem handling the number of fonts, but organization was a pain.

The new Font Book has some much needed improvement. It now clearly indicates duplicate fonts and makes resolving duplicates easy. And, more important, it does a fantastic job of diagnosing font issues — far better than Suitcase, it turns out. I had nearly 80 fonts in my Suitcase library that were in some way defective (ranging from missing kerning information to more dramatic problems). So hands down, kudos for the new Font Book.

I’ve removed Suitcase Fusion and am loving it — Suitcase has had its quirks and problems and frankly I think they’ve been getting worse. Lately I’ve seen huge CPU usage, lockups, and less reliability than in the past… and reviews of the latest release make it sound even worse. Now that Lion has some really solid font management and organization improvements, it’s one less thing I have install (and pay for).