Back to Blog
Fontagent 8 manual7/2/2023 ![]() ![]() I had tried out an earlier version of this program, but shied away because I found it too intrusive: the installer demanded my password, which I found suspicious it wanted to take control of my already installed fonts and when it imported fonts, it reported having performed hundreds of "repairs" to them, without asking my permission and without explaining just what it had done. Recently, however, I’ve put a tentative toe back into the font management waters by taking a look at FontAgent Pro, from Insider Software. So, since the advent of Panther, I’ve kept my font management minimal, using Apple’s own Font Book as described in my ebook "Take Control of Customizing Panther." Also, by that time, Extensis had acquired Font Reserve, ending the healthy competition between the two, and the steam seemed to go out of the development on both products. I then tried Extensis’s Suitcase and stayed with it happily for a year or so, but eventually it broke against Panther, and although a revised version was issued, I found it sluggish and undependable. For many years I was strongly attached to DiamondSoft’s Font Reserve, but it foundered somewhat on the breakers of Mac OS X initially it didn’t support many Mac OS X fonts, and Classic activation was never reliable. In past TidBITS articles, I’ve talked about what a problem font management on the Macintosh has always been, and what steps I’ve taken to alleviate it on my own machine. #1659: Exposure notifications shut down, cookbook subscription service, alarm notification type proposal, Explain XKCD. ![]() ![]() #1660: OS updates for sports and security, Drobo in bankruptcy, why TidBITS doesn't cover rumors.#1661: Mimestream app for Gmail, auto-post WordPress headlines to Twitter and Mastodon, My Photo Stream shutting down.#1662: New Macs, 12 top OS features for 2023, vertical tabs in Web browsers, watchOS 9.5.1.#1663: Exploring the Apple Vision Pro, 12 more OS features coming in 2023, new Apple service features, Apollo shuts down.I’d love to streamline this process even more, especially by bypassing the initial setup screens and auto-installing the Adobe Plugins. When users launch the application, they just have to click through the initial setup screens, and then login to the font server with their credentials. DeploymentĪll 3 of these pieces (the application, the activation pkg, and the profile) can be deployed with Munki (or in my case, Gruntwork) to the correct workstations. mobileconfig profile using mcxToProfile, and then stripped out every preference except for ‘CheckForUpdatesAutomatically’ to accomplish this. I don’t want the built in updater to run. Smasher works the same way, although it only requires the Registration file. This way I can simply copy the Activation and Registration files into the same directory as the Makefile, edit the TITLE and REVERSE_DOMAIN at the top of the Makefile, and run ‘make pkg’. To do this in a repeatable fashion, I made a template Makefile for The Luggage. This was suggested to me by Insider Software as the best way to deploy the license to multiple Macs. If you are using a volume license, you can copy these files to the same location on another Mac to complete the activation. When FontAgent Pro is activated, it drops two files (Activation and Registration) into /Library/Application Support/FontAgent Pro/. munki recipe that triggers the Smasher uninstall script in /Applications/Smasher/Uninstall.app/Resources/. To address this, I added a one-line post-uninstall script to the. However, if you trigger an uninstall through Munki, it only removes FAP. When the install is done through Munki, both FontAgent Pro and Smasher are installed. Except for one thing- Smasher.pkg is bundled into the same. dmg, which means the recipe is pretty basic. Insider Software publishes a single link that always points to the latest release. I wrote an AutoPkg recipe for FontAgent Pro 6 here. I will edit this once I do the next deployment. Note: While everything seems to work ok in my tests, I have not rolled any of this out in production yet. Here are some things that I have done to start to automate this a bit. Unfortunately, setting it up has previously been a manual process that involved touching each workstation to install, license and configure the app. Many of the clients I work with use FontAgent Pro for font management. Deploying FontAgent Pro (and Smasher) using Munki ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |