FontExplorer X is fantastic and free, it solved all of my silly font problems.
NVU is a good, good free program for coding.
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NOT FOR DESIGNERS: I love Resident Evil 4 in all of its horrible, shambling glory. The variety of tasks, challenges, and possible solutions rivals some of the cleverest PC games, but it all works with a perfectly clean cinematic style. Also, I’m a fan of pretty much any game that makes fear an actual gameplay element….the first few times I played, I missed half my shots just out of panic.
And Mele doesn’t seem to mind watching. “Ohhh, you forgot to cover that window.” “No! Get off me you filthy zombie!” “Oh man, it’s coming out of that guy’s neck!” “AUGH I HATE I HATE IT I HATE IT.” “That spanish guy doesn’t seem to be helping much.” “No, he’s not. I hate him.”
what font problems? like Mac to PC font problems?
There are a number of common font problems.
1) RAM. When you have 3000+ fonts, you can no longer run any program without severe slowdowns. FontExplorerX (and others) allow you to flip fonts on and off when you need them, instead of keeping them hovering in the background at all times.
2) Auto-activate. Unlike my old font program, FEX automatically intercepts font requests and switches fonts on when I open documents. In the past, I had to memorize the list of fonts missing, go to Extensis, and turn them on one by one.
3) Tiger. Tiger is an evil beast that refuses to work with a good 70% of my font types, and has numerous “duplication” font errors. Fonts work perfectly with FEX.
4) Font family grouping. Back in a day, if you got Clarendon, you’d actually get eight fonts….for each weight, and italic versions. You were supposed to put them into a folder in your fonts directory, but this custom passed, and many of us see Clarendon as a weird font that hangs out in the Bs (B Clarendon), the Is (Ital Clarendon), and the Cs. FEX finds and groups these little jerks.
5) Sorting. FEX makes it easy to clump pixel fonts, serifs, favorites, and secret weapons into folders for quick-finding.
I wonder if this is something my design studio would find useful. They typically have a lot of Mac to PC fonts when designs get passed off to developers (who are all on PCs). They’re all on Tiger– maybe I’ll just forward it to the design director and stop thinking out loud.
Mac to PC I cannot help you with. Your developers should be on the Macs!