The matcher tool in this suite, how fast is it and what do you define as a large font collection that makes it crash?
The FontDetect application is pretty fast - of course that depends on your total number of fonts, as you can imagine.
What I define as a large collection? Well, my Linotype library has 5145 fonts inside.
Actually the problem is not with the font detection application. The suite consists of 3 main applications - FontMassive (the manager), FontDetect (the thing that recognizes fonts) and Fontemp (the app, that allows you to temporarily install fonts). They're tied together, I mean - in order to recognize fonts you first have to add all (or some) of your fonts to FontMassive program, and then you launch the FontDetect application. So, the program that chokes on large collections is FonTMassive - the main application. I suspect that I probably have some damaged fonts that make it choke, because the author of the program claims that he is managed to add like 10 000 fonts at once with no problem whatsoever. Who knows :)
Thanks. Just wanted to know whether it was time for improvement. But that does not seem to be the case. I run more than 20.000 in 6 minutes but have a crash when at the same time I temporarily install a font from that same directory. Have learned to live with that.
I guess the forum is not exactly the place for "pro" chat, but what's your font manager? I tried them all, and Suitcase seems to be the one with least problems and crashes, although it's a memory hog. I've tried Fontmaster, Font Fitting Room Deluxe, Main Type...to name a few.
By the way, the kid that wrote this FontMassive is very nice and he will work with me so we can find what causes the crash, so there's a chance for improvement.
I use Typograf as font manager because it does everything I want to and fast and without crashes. But that is for win and not for apples. The one thing it does not do is matching. For that, if I don't know/remember/... , I use a matcher. If I have the feeling it is commercial wtf often helps - and often not (a bit condensed, expanded, slanted, ... , and wtf gets stuck) or Identifont (RF's favourite, but I don't like it) Or I use my matcher. Scans the bitmap image of a character and then temporarily installs, compares the bitmap with the corresponding glyph and uninstalls the font. Works well and fast, up to 90 fonts a second. Is critical though for the quality of the bitmap so most of the time is lost with restoring over-compressed jpg's. If the bitmap is out of bound the thing crashes and I have to make a smaller bitmap.
Yesterday I've stumbled upon this fantastic suite of small applications, targeted to fonta management and font recognition:
http://klesha28.ucoz.ru/index/0-4
Unfortunately for most you it's in Russian ONLY. The program does almost everything that Suitcase, FontAgent and other management programs are capable of and besides that is FREE :) It doesn't require installation. It also has a neat font recognition tool, which allows you to load a scanned image of the font you're looking for, then it scans your whole library of fonts to find the closest match (I've tested it and it's damn accurate). It has proprietary font drawing algorithm which means that it's nearly 100% faster than Suitcase.
Other cool things : you to enter some text and then when you choose specific font, the app allows you to copy the selected text as Adobe Illustrator outlines to clipboard (I have been dreaming for such feature :) Export as various image formats (PNG with alpha transparency too) available. It also allows you to see the actual vector data of a given character, with bezier curve handles and points.
Few drawbacks tho:
it only allows you to temporarily enable fonts, in other words when you restart Windows, they will be disabled.
It crashes when you try to add large font collections like Adobe Font Folio 9 for example.
Definitely something to watch in the future.