Case Study: Extensis Font Reserve Server saves newspaper's support staff from having to chase down rogue fonts and makes font management an easy job.Sometimes the calls would come in the middle of the night. Sometimes it required getting a master key and getting into somebody's office and starting up their machine to look for just one little thing.
It may sound like some cloak-and-dagger operation but, in reality, it was the life of Cassandra Corrigan as system engineer for the The Hartford Courant, in Hartford, Conn., and she was hunting for… a font.
Corrigan's issues with fonts came about because the paper's page designers had separate font collections on their desktops and there wasn't any "font library" that housed all the fonts. In many cases, only one person might have had a font on one machine in the building, and it became her job to track that down. Corrigan was looking for a solution.
"It was like the wild west here," Corrigan said. "The font issue was where things were blowing out on the RIPs. We had a lot of corrupt fonts, and we didn't know where our fonts library was. It's a four-story building with people all over it, and you have to track down the actual machine a font came from to make whatever item, be it an ad or whatever, work. Absolute nightmare."
Luckily for Corrigan, a trade show find proved to be the answer she was looking for. "Must have been 1999 and we found Font Reserve. We first used it as a stand-alone product and loved it, so we started calling constantly to find out when they'd have the server version available."
Font Reserve, the font management software originally owned and developed by DiamondSoft Inc. and acquired by Extensis Inc. in 2003, allows a single manager, such as Corrigan, to manage all the fonts within a service bureau, newspaper, magazine or any other creative environment, with a pretty simple WYSIWYG screen and about two to three days of setup.
Click here to read more about how font management utilities can help bring type under control.
"Before, we had to go to every machine to load a font," Corrigan said. "We had no way of stopping people from adding whatever fonts they wanted on their machine. We didn't know if we had licenses for all the fonts in the building, and a lot of the fonts would turn out to be corrupt."
Corrigan said it took up most of her time just doing font management before getting Font Reserve. "We could find receipts for hot type sooner than we could find ones for our fonts," Corrigan said. "Now we know we're clean and we're legal."
Font Reserve Server, which runs on a Windows 2000 Server, was the right solution at the right time. "We had looked at Suitcase and at Adobe Type Manager Deluxe but when we saw this solution, it made sense."
To get started, Corrigan needed to be sure they had licenses for the fonts all the departments said they needed. "We bought a lot of libraries just outright, just to be sure," Corrigan said.
In Font Reserve, Corrigan loaded all the purchased fonts into the master list of the server. The client was loaded onto all the machines in the building that dealt with fonts. Only one group, besides the system engineers, was allowed access to the master list of fonts and that was the group responsible for working with the outside vendors and who then worked with a lot of the internal departments.
From there, Corrigan needed to set up workgroups to give access to certain sets of fonts for certain groups.
"News didn't want to have to look at fonts that were strictly for advertising or for classified and likewise classified and advertising. So, you create workgroups in Font Reserve and assign fonts to it and then users and then it's manageable for each group," Corrigan said. "And then, Font Reserve allows applications to turn on the fonts as they need them, instead of just loading everything up every time."
Next Page: No more midnight visits to track down missing fonts.
Corrigan said before they installed Font Reserve, she and another system engineer would field at least 20 to 30 calls a month about a font problem. "We're down to zero now."
And, no more having to get into offices in the middle of the night. "It's so effortless to add a font. It's all drag-and-drop, and you can even do it via VPN from home if you do get a call late at night," Corrigan said.
Of course, not everybody was thrilled to have fonts be managed so closely. "We were told we were taking away their creativity," Corrigan said. "But they came to realize we were giving them back their creativity because now they could spend their time doing the creative work and not trying to track down some font that won't show up. We were saving them time."
The Hartford Courant has a seat count of about 100 for the product, and Corrigan said there about 4,500 fonts or so that are being managed now via Font Reserve Server.
Each group can now sort fonts by type, such as serif, and can see a font on the fly by different type sizes, etc. There's no need for a spec book, Corrigan said. Groups also have a wider range of choices now and an easy way to remember grouped fonts.
"Say you're doing an ad for the first time and you have 47, 57, however many fonts and you have 28 stylesheets you're going to use to generate this ad," Corrigan explains. "If you let the autoactivation put in the fonts and then you make it a set, later, when you need to make this ad again, with one click all these fonts and stylesheets are right there. And these sets are unique to each login plus you can share these sets with everyone in your group. This adds to the consistency."
Click here to read a feature story about font foundries.
Corrigan knows it's not an easy transition to decide to make.
"It was a painful first month to get through," Corrigan said. "Hardest thing was collecting all our fonts that were being used. Now, no matter what CPU you log into, you get your same font set. Used to be it was unique to each CPU and that was a nightmare."
The Courant has licensed the entire Linotype library outright. It's a PostScript house, but Corrigan sees that changing soon. "I think in the next two years we're going to have to repurchase our entire library as OpenType. I think that's where we're headed," Corrigan said.
Her life is much simpler now. "A new font comes to me for approval and I make sure it's clean and licensed. I place it on the server and activate it for whatever group needs it. I probably only add a font or two a year," Corrigan said. "I can honestly say I can now go 24 months without once thinking about the font server."
From having to get into offices in the middle of the night to never thinking about it?
"I think the biggest story that's going to connect with somebody on the fence about having something like this is that you ask yourself, Have I ever had to run around, find something ready to go to production and all the fonts are missing? You have to track down each and every font, find out who has it, what CPU it's on. That's all time wasted, and now that's all gone for me."
"This solution, for us, really worked and filled the void," Corrigan said.
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