Suitcase Fusion

Suitcase Fusion 12.0.1 is part font organiser, part automated font activator and part font repair tool. Despite being a ‘venerable’ utility, it’s never been a must-have for any designer – more a ‘nice to have’ – since it’s always suffered from bugs and a lack of killer features.

The latest, certainly the greatest, but still not completely impressive Suitcase of them all includes useful new tools that still don’t quite lift it into the category of ‘indispensable’.

Suitcase Fusion, as it’s called – thanks to the inclusion of features from FontReserve – can now strip apart font suitcases when you add them to its Font Vault, so it only has to activate one font at a time. You can define font sets that Suitcase will activate when you launch particular applications. Since it now gathers far greater information about each typeface, it should activate the exact font you want, even when there are similar fonts available. There are also a number of other improvements, such as nested sets, an improved Find function, the ability to view PostScript names and drag-and-drop font export.

These are all good, useful features in theory, but unfortunately Suitcase remains as buggy as ever, causing application freezes and frequently failing to activate fonts automatically. And when compared with the likes of Font Book and Linotype’s FontExplorer X, which offers the majority of Suitcase’s features for free, the price tag seems extraordinarily high.

You’d be better off sticking with FontExplorer X and investing in a copy of FontDoctor X, the source of Suitcase’s font repair capabilities. Try harder next time, Extensis.