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/.

Delano Caps is a Display font and its attributes include decorative, engraving, caps only. Delano Caps is similar to URW Dextor which was originally designed by L. Meuffels in 1994. Dextor was originally offered by the French company, Mecanorma. It is also offered by URW, Linotype and Scangraphic.

Check back often for information on font design and font editing.

The Flagstaff font can be downloaded this month for free from http://www.freefont.de/us. It is available in PC TrueType and PostScript Type 1 formats and Macintosh PostScript Type 1 format. This font is very similar to the Glyphic Series originally designed by Richard A. Schlatter in 1972. There is also another font family released in 2002 – Glyphic Neue by Typeco – which is also very similar.

EOT Fonts

The EOT font format is for displaying typefaces on web pages that users would not normally have installed on their local computers. Fonts are converted to the EOT format and uploaded to the website by the webmaster. When viewers load the web page in their browser, the EOT fonts are downloaded into a temporary folder similar to how other temporary files are downloaded and stored (graphics files, html files, etc.).  The browser uses the fonts from this temporary storage area to display them on the web page. The EOT fonts are encrypted to prevent them from being used for any other purpose. This prevents a font from being used on a web site other than the one it was licensed for.

Browser Support

The EOT font technology was developed by Microsoft along with the release of Internet Explorer 4 and has continued support going forward for later versions of Internet Explorer. Currently, Microsoft Internet Explorer is the only browser to support the EOT font format.

Our Comments

While the EOT font format goes a long way for web designers to have more freedom to use more typefaces than just the basic web fonts (Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia, Courier New, Trebuchet, Verdana, Andale Mono), it is not a complete solution. There are many other browsers – Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, etc. The ideal solution would be one that is supported by all browsers – similar to CSS.

More Information

Linotype has a web page with a complete FAQ and more details here: http://www.linotype.com/en/5926/eotfonts.html