I recently acquired quite a number of fonts and had question marks about some of the files. Mac Fontbook gave error messages and I was looking for a possibility to repair them. Too soon I bought me a license of FontDoctor, which is in my opinion an overrated and overpriced application.

It doesn't give as much detailed info on what's wrong with the font as the free Mac Fontbook does. It never repaired anything and even indicated fonts to be OK, when it was clear by the use of the font, that it wasn't OK at all.

I approached the developer for support and was asked to send the font. That was the last thing I ever heard about it.

Furthermore I want to warn about the instability. I know I have a lot of fonts, but half of the time the program just completely quits during startup.

The only nice thing I could discover is the ability to organize your font files, but that would even be more useful in combination with a good renaming function.

They call giving the interface a funereal gray face an update. Too bad they're taking their design cues from Steve Jobs, whose taste has tanked lately, if iTunes 10 is any guide. Anyway, while $20 is a good price for the upgrade, for me the new interface, which they're implementing in all their products, is a turn-off. Absent any compelling functional innovations, I'll take a pass on this one - until they make this dead gray an option instead of unavoidable.

We had a font that FontBook reported as having problems, and warning us to "proceed with caution". FontBook correctly advised us the 'kern' table structure and contents had problems.
We downloaded FontDoctor to set about repairing the font.
FontDoctor validated the font and incorrectly told us the font was OK and did not need repair.

FontBook is FREE and supplied with MacOS. It can validate fonts and identify problems.
FontDoctor is $70.

In our test we were unable to get FontDoctor to identify the problem, let alone attempt to fix it.

Maybe it can identify some problems, but it certainly does not identify all the problems you can identify for free using Apple's FontBook.

Proceed with caution.

I do like FontDoctor and have used it on and off for years. However I see the latest version 7.5.1 still has that nasty tendency to unexpectedly quit when trying to "fix" problems - on a large file that means starting again and narrowing the search and as such can be very time consuming.

I love it! Font Book has given me false alarms on a few occasions and this is a lot faster, too! A lot of customization available through a clean, Mac-like GUI makes for the ultimate font tool!

I especially like the feature that allows you to scan a custom location :-)

Has disagreements with FontExplorerX.

Though LinoType FontExplorer X finds various PostScript fonts to have missing outline files for some styles, FontDoctorX gives them a "PASS" on all tests.

Since FontExplorerX can determine that the styles *should* exist, i assume there's data about them in the suitcase.

Therefore it seems to be FontDoctorX which is mistakenly giving them a PASS on the "Missing PostScript Fonts" test and making no repairs.