FontAgent Pro offers Cocoa font management app

Insider Software has released a public beta of FontAgent Pro, a Cocoa application that manages, organizes and repairs fonts.

The utility has been designed from the ground up to take advantage of all the capabilities of Mac OS X 10.2 (“Jaguar”), according to Insider spokesperson Sid Rein. He describes FontAgent Pro as “a complete font manager and repair utility.” It repairs or eliminates corrupt fonts, partial and unmatched fonts, duplicate fonts, unnecessary point sizes and builds optimized, organized font libraries. FontAgent Pro lets you build font libraries and font sets, activate and deactivate fonts, preview fonts in various typefaces, and open just the fonts you need for current projects. It also offers the ability to:

Define multiple font libraries that can be opened simultaneously;

Define font sets that traverse multiple font libraries;

Activate and deactivate sets of fonts simultaneously from multiple libraries;

Rename font files with meaningful file names for easy management;

Verify fonts on-the-fly as they are activated;

Reorganize scattered fonts into useful libraries that maintain original font-file formats;

Preview any text string in any size in any typeface and in any color;

Allows for interactive font display in context.

FontAgent Pro supports PostScript Type 1, Mac TrueType fonts, Mac OS X dfonts, as well as OpenType and Windows TrueType fonts. All Mac OS X compliant applications can now take advantage of FontAgent Pro’s automatic font activation capabilities, Rein said. Plus, you can specify a default activation order.

FontAgent Pro requires Mac OS X version 10.2 or later, 3MB of disk space, and 7MB of memory. The public beta is available now at the Insider Software Web site. The final version is due next month and will have a suggested retail price of US$99.95.