In today journalism there is question who to write for: beginners, users, powerusers or experts. That is the real problem, because either you hold someone stupid by explaining the obvious or you're so complicated that reader needs phD to resolve what was your acutal goal. With that in mind, however, you article was light and informative and I enjoyed it albeit everything is quite known for DTP professionals such as myself and is not of particular value neither to amateurs as they don't face real world DTP nightmare, and the same is for English speaking: what do you care about Unicode support. Well, news today: rest of the world does care and I'm still not shure what to do about whole thing, Apps and their support for Apple implementation, various compatibility problems and how to produce font which will behave correctly and which tools to use. If you shed some light on this I'll hold you a personal God (I promise).

I've been to hell and back trying to consolidate a font database using FontDoctor first with Suitcase, then with Font Reserve. While FD is supposed to fix font problems, it consolidated them into folders in a way that FR couldn't read them or see their linked resources [outlines with PS fonts]. Plus OT dfonts seemed to further confuse the issue. I've a several thousand dollar collection of fonts that I wonder if I'll ever be able to recover satisfactorily and organize in any coherent way. I've lost several fonts due to resources being removed as 'duplicates' which turned out to not to be dups after all. Of all the transitions to OSX, Fonts are my only regret. Fonts also seem to be the problem when dealing with print houses not ready for OSX, CID fonts, or dfonts.

I liked your article very much and only disagree a bit, you say only Apple makes dFonts... Well I didn't know I was that big... :) I'm making dFonts, too. For corporate clients on OS-X it's a good way, though I'm mainly for the spreading of OpenType, and the foundries that don't see that, don't see the light of the oncoming train and will only end up as debris while the train goes on.

Agreed, the dFont wasn't the smartest move Apple ever made, it has it's benefits that raise over the current OpenType features.

One .dfont file (bundle) can contain all the weights of your font, metrics files and all the feature tables such as sophisticated glyph substitutions and the like. That's quite something when looking at the font clutter in your font folder. I'd like to see that in OpenType as well.

That's not a serenade for Apple nor Adobe, just a type designers view on our everyday reality.

Have a great time,
Frank Jonen

In a nutshell, I'd love to know which fonts are safe to toss out of all libraries.
In the old days (two months ago for me) I only kept the minimum city fonts in the sys folder.
What is the equiv for OSX?
What are dfonts for (other than to conflict with my postscript fonts)? Why the heck does Apple load the rather inaccessible system library with a dirth of designer fonts that are now stuck there?

Yes, there are font managers. They work just fine (mostly). But, you still need ATM for display in Classic. And, grouping families in menus is nightmare. We've taken so many steps forward in OSX, but font usage is, in some ways, back to pre-OS 7. Of course, this issue of Classic will be moot once Quark 6.0 comes out.