According to Brian Berson, General Manager at Extensis, he announced, “We understand that times are tough for our customers right now,” and also stated, “By adding Tiger compatibility, users can benefit from the outstanding previews and performance of Suitcase Fusion 2 without upgrading their Mac OS .”

The latest release, version 13.2 offers compatibility for Windows 7 and version 13.2.1 for Macintosh OS 10.6 Snow Leopard. The Windows version has feature parity with the Macintosh version. In the past, the Windows versions of many font managers has lagged behind the Macintosh versions. This is good news for Windows users because Suitcase Fusion 2 has some really neat features:

• Font previewing with a floating preview
• Plug-in based auto-activation for professional applications
• Custom Global Auto-Activation on an application-by-application level
• Portable, secure font vault plus option to add fonts in-place
• Font searching, tagging and classification options
• Scans and repairs corrupt fonts

Extensis has put together a really nice website where you can check out all the new features of Suitcase Fusion 2 and some really cool videos here: http://www.extensis.com/en/products/suitcasefusion2/.

Rosetta is a small (2 MB) library that comes with Mac OS X and enables Intel Macs to run PowerPC code. Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 installed Rosetta by default. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard does not. If you’re installing Mac OS X 10.6 yourself, you can choose the “Customize” option during installation, and enable Rosetta so that it will be installed on your system.

If you already have Mac OS X 10.6 installed on your computer, and try to launch one of FontLab’s installers, a dialog box should appear telling you “To open this application, you need to install Rosetta. Would you like to install it now?” Choose “Install” and proceed with the Rosetta installation. After it is complete, install the FontLab application as usual.

WhatTheFont supports most common image file formats such as BMP, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc. The website offers tips for getting a good result, such as the maximum size of the uploaded image and the optimum number of pixels for the letter height.

The results are very impressive. Even with a low resolution sample, if it is upsampled in Photoshop and steps are taken to create a clean image, the results can be spot on. You can use Photoshop to clean up the image by converting all the characters to black and white and adjusting the brightness and contrast to get nice, dark letters. Then you can go to the trouble to make sure each letter is separated by a little space.

I have used this tool over and over and it has saved me a ton of time looking through specimen sheets trying to find that font that I just know, but can’t remember the name.

The Macintosh free version, FontExplorer X 1.2.3, is still available here:
http://fex.linotype.com/download/mac/FontExplorerX123.dmg

The Windows free (final beta) version, FontExplorer X 0.9.1, build 2250, is still available here:
http://fex.linotype.com/download/pc/FontExplorerX-0.9.1.2250.exe

Simply browse to an image file on your local computer and submit the online form. It will output the converted image as an SVG file which can be saved to your local drive. The file can be loaded into Adobe Illustrator and saved in native Illustrator AI or EPS format. These formats are very portable and can be edited and imported into FontLab, Fontographer or other font editing program.

The AutoTrace program is very impressive. Sample screenshots are available here at this link: http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/index.html#screenshots. There are comparisons with other programs (Comparison of tracing a small m with AutoTrace and other programs, Comparison of tracing small circles with AutoTrace and Scanfont and Comparison of tracing letters with AutoTrace and Scanfont).

It is interesting to note that one of the aims of the developers is to make AutoTrace better than ScanFont 3.0.