Suitcase Fusion 2 is an early adopter, with seamless auto-activation support for Adobe InDesign and Illustrator CS3/CS4 and QuarkXPress 7/8. It's more than the upgrade you've been waiting for.

By Kelly Kordes Anton

Remember that old Reese's Peanut Butter Cup® commercial with a girl walking along eating a chocolate bar and the guy walking along eating peanut butter straight out of the jar? They collide, the chocolate meets the peanut butter, and they exclaim "you got peanut butter on my chocolate" and "you got chocolate in my peanut butter;" and the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup is born — two great tastes that taste great together.

 

Suitcase Fusion 2	Suitcase Fusion 2

This is kind of what happens when Illustrator, InDesign, or QuarkXPress® meet Suitcase Fusion® 2. You can really experience typography through the tightest integration ever between your page-layout software and your font manager. The all-new Suitcase Fusion 2 for Mac OS (see figure 1) combines all the speed and power you need for managing fonts plus creative options ideally suited to QuarkXPress 8 or InDesign CS4. Let's take a closer look.

Figure 1 A look at the Suitcase Fusion 2 window showcases the organizational features, the level of detail, and the customizable expert previews available in this upgrade.

To see an overview of the software, click here.

A direct line to design

There are plenty of obligatory things to say about Suitcase Fusion 2 — stable, reliable, rebuilt from the ground up — but we'll get to that later. I'll start with what you really want to know: What's so cool about a font manager? After writing about font managers for almost 20 years, I didn't think anything could surprise me. In fact, when I scheduled a demo of Suitcase Fusion 2, I was prepared to be a little bored. Instead, I came away not just impressed but convinced that I absolutely must have this upgrade right away.

What could elicit this reaction in something as potentially blasé as a font manager? It's the way Suitcase Fusion 2 interacts with your page-layout application, streamlining the process of not only activating a font but deciding on which font to use in the first place. Through new floating previews in Suitcase Fusion 2, you can see any text, at any size, in any combination of fonts right on the page. No activating fonts, no duplicating text boxes, no repetitively applying fonts. I had to believe Brian Berson, general manger of Extensis, when he said, "The interface is modern and flexible, offering professional search and organization tools and amazing font previews that you have to see to believe."

Floating previews

Here's how it works: Select a few fonts in the Suitcase Fusion 2 window. Choose QuickType from the preview menu and type in the words you'd like to see. Use the type size slider, menu, or field to specify the size of the text. The preview area shows the text in all the selected fonts. Now, if you position the Suitcase Fusion 2 window and your document window window side by side, you can drag these previews onto the page to take a look. Click the floating preview icon  in the upper-right corner of each preview to drag it (figure 2). Once you decide on the perfect font, close the floating previews, activate the font, and apply it to the text in your design (figure 3).

Figure 2 You can create previews of any text, in any size, in any font and then drag floating previews to the page layout. In this example, I created a smart set of Script fonts and selected fonts within that set.

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