If keep it simple is your motto for managing your fonts, you will certainly find Extensis’s Suitcase 8 a satisfying and simple tool to use. This update to Suitcase 3.0 builds upon the original solid foundation, makes a few important additions, adds some useful upgrades, and doesn’t go overboard with bells and whistles you don’t need.
The premise behind Extensis’s fine-tuning of Suitcase holds that your font management tool should be simple and concern itself mainly with the task of turning fonts on and off, and that none of the program’s additional features should interfere with that basic functioning. With the improvement of some of Suitcase’s original features and the addition of great new tools, Suitcase 8 attains its goal and remains an easy, effective way to manage and organize your fonts.
Improvements to the previous version of Suitcase include the ability to open fonts temporarily by simply dragging and dropping them onto the Suitcase icon. Suitcase also has drag-and-drop capabilities available for reorganizing and adding fonts to sets. A WYSIWYG font menu control panel, Suitcase 8 MenuFont, is a system extension that gives you the ability to show fonts as they really appear in an application’s font menu. MenuFont also groups your fonts in hierarchical menus by family, and indicates whether they are PostScript, TrueType, bitmapped, or Multiple Master fonts. It can also display a specific font such as Dingbat or Symbol by name instead of in WYSIWYG mode.
Important new features in Suitcase 8 include compatibility with Mac OS 8.5 and 8.6, and AppleScript support for all of the operations available in the application. Suitcase 8 XT, a font activation XTension, gives Suitcase the ability to look for and activate fonts, as well as indicate any that are missing when you open a QuarkXPress document.
This includes fonts used in embedded EPS files; the Xtension then turns off those fonts when you close the document. Using Suitcase 8 XT increases Quark’s launch time, but you can easily disable it in the Quark Preferences menu, and Suitcase 8 XT still gives you a display of the missing fonts to find and open by hand.
FontAgent is by far the coolest addition Extensis made to Suitcase 8. This stand-alone program searches your disks for fonts, verifies their integrity; gets rid of duplicates, identifies unmatched fonts, and pairs screen fonts with their PostScript counterparts. It then puts all of your fonts into a neat, organized library and places the old fonts into a saved folder or directly into the Trash. Gaining control of your fonts just doesn’t get any easier.
Suitcase 8 is an exceptional improvement on a solid font management workhorse. Simplicity, ease of use, and the ability to organize and manage your fonts effortlessly make Suitcase 8 a dynamite utility.
Meredith, Susan. (September 1999). Suitcase 8. MacAddict. (pg. 68).
Extensis Corporation
Applications
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2014-04-14 / 
2024-03-11 / 
ef33f8d31657322b2eefd9cd855b4dd2f463c8b0 / 
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suitcasetm_8.1.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
