Review of designer's font management utility MasterJuggler.

Font management software reviewed

MasterJuggler 3.0.4

Alsoft’s MasterJuggler is a worthy, but somewhat tired contender in the battle of the font managers. Only available for Mac OS X, so Windows designers will have to look elsewhere.

MasterJuggler has all the usual font cataloging and activation features that you would expect from a professional font managing tool and it implements this very well. Fonts can be organized into custom sets and activated or deactivated as required.

Master Juggler also works well with fonts in the Classic environment and will warn about potential compatibility issues. However, it doesn't identify or deal with all installed system fonts as smoothly as it should and this can get a bit tedious. Both Suitcase and FontAgent are capable of managing System fonts directly - with varying degrees of success.

MasterJuggler will inform the user of font problems, but it doesn't have the ability to fix or manage these issues. It also lacks automated font activation, which is a major omission and until it adds this functionality, it will lag behind the other two.

This may not be long. At one point MasterJuggler was seen as a major challenger to Suitcase and it may only be one upgrade behind. We hope so.

MasterJuggler is published by Alsoft.

Choosing a font manager > Suitcase > MasterJuggler > FontAgent Pro

4 March 2006

Other font and typography related topics

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Forum discussions

• Font management software
• Organizing fonts
• Are free fonts worth using
• MasterJuggler Vs Suitcase