Pros: Allows you to display fonts as themselves, and to group all fonts into groups based on your own criteria.However thus upgrade may not be big enough to justify the price for those on a budget
Cons: Appears to generate system conflicts on some systems
Categories: Interface & System Enhancements. Typeface / fonts utility
Developer: Adobe Systems, Inc. http://www.adobe.com/
I had steered well clear of Adobe's Type Reunion Deluxe after a number of highly respected designers had warned against it on a couple of design mailing lists I subscribed to at the time. Evidently it conflicted with something in earlier versions of the Mac OS, or perhaps some other commonly used third party system extensions, and created undue instability.
Below Type Reunion's Groups dialog. Helps you get a handle on all the fonts a typical designer has on her/his system, by allowing you to group them into families, or client names or jobs. One font can go into several groups, and you can add or subtract groups as needed. Click to see more.
 
At any rate, as soon as I installed the Mac OS 8.5.1 update I thought to myself, "Why not give ATR a go?" I had acquired a vast number of new fonts along with some new software, and needed some way of getting to grips with them all. Most typeface names are less than descriptive, and many foundries make fonts that are copies of well known faces but give them completely different names.
The average designer may have 1, 2 or 3 hundred fonts on her / his system, although you rarely need as many as that active all the time, and with that many undescriptive names it is a hard job sometimes remembering just what Dogsbody Bold Italic actually looks like before you apply it to that current Web design job.
Adobe has been retailing its double pack consisting of Adobe Type Reunion Deluxe 2.0 and Adobe Type Manager Deluxe 4.0 for some time now, at a very attractive price, and against very little serious competition from other design software developers. I also have a copy of Font Reserve from Diamond Software, which came bundled with CorelDRAW 8, and Quark guru David Blatner recommends it highly but for now I am sticking with Adobe's products on this system as Font Reserve cannot coexist with ATM or ATR.
There are also less well known utilities such as MasterJuggler from Alsoft and Suitcase from Symantec, but I have not been able to obtain copies of them and so they are out of the equation here.
 
How is it performing?
In a word, perfectly! There are no signs of any system instability, and I truly appreciate the ability to keep my fonts better organised. I have a couple of hundred fonts on this machine, a handful of them in the Fonts folder within the System Folder, and the rest within named suitcases and folders inside a folder titled Fonts, within my Applications folder.
Currently I have a number of ATR groups set up that are descriptive of the font's design style: DecoModerne, Destructive, Geometric, Historic, Typographic, Pi + Symbols, and so on. I will refine those groups as time goes by, and add new ones for specific jobs and clients.
How am I using it?
Adobe Type Reunion works beautifully in combination with two other font utilities: PopChar Pro and Adobe Type Manager Deluxe 4.0. If I am doing some typesetting within FreeHand 8, for instance, I can look within a given font group to see what is there, open up ATM Deluxe 4.0 if the relevant fonts are unactivated, view them if needed, activate them, and then return to FreeHand to set my type. I use PopChar Pro to look at all the font's characters, especially the nonstandard ones, and click on one that I want.
Or if I need to be quickly reminded of what a particular activated font looks like, I can simply look at its name displayed in the font itself. At the end of the work session, if I decide to keep a record of the fonts I used for future reference, I can use ATR to add a group of fonts specific to that project. Then I will deactivate all the fonts I don't normally use, and shut down for day. The next day, I look at my named groups and know exactly what I used in that job the day before.
Another choice I now have with ATR is that of renaming any given font to something more appropriate. For example I can now rename Skia as "My Letter Font" and know that it is the one I will type all my letters in, from then onwards.
Adobe Type Reunion has made the process of keeping my fonts organised so much easier, and together with ATM and PopChar Pro I do pretty much everything font-related that I need. Even better is that the price of all these utilities is far from high.
