If you support a design department of any size, various font problems have long been a thorn in your side. If your organization hasn’t felt your pain and moved to an expensive server-based solution, that means there’s a good chance you’ve been running some version of Extensis’ Suitcase as your font management tool. Like it’s competitors Font Agent Pro and FontExplorer, Suitcase has had a checkered technical past, but the new Suitcase Fusion 2 seemed to be a well designed and stable product. Then Apple shipped Leopard 10.5.6.

Suddenly, stable installations of Suitcase Fusion wouldn’t launch at all, with no obvious error or explanation as to why. The answer lies inexplicably in Extensis’ handling of a computer’s Bonjour name, the publicly-seen machine name set in the “Sharing” pane of OS X’s System Preferences. If a Bonjour name exceeds 20 characters, or features non-alphanumeric characters, Suitcase Fusion is apparently too distracted to let your users get their work done. Extensis hasn’t provided any public information on why computer names might be an obstacle to font management.

Unless you feel like renaming all your workstations, the sane response is to hold back the 10.5.6 update until Extensis addresses the issue with a Suitcase update or Apple changes something back in 10.5.7. When the situation changes, we’ll update this article with more information.

Update: About a month after 10.5.6 shipped, Extensis followed with Suitcase Fusion 13.0.2, released specifically to solve this issue.