How do font files appear in Mac OS X?

Unlike previous versions of Mac OS, in which fonts resided in suitcases that you could click to open, Mac OS X organizes fonts into individual folders; suitcases don’t look like suitcases anymore; they simply look like a different kind of file.


 
In Mac OS X, double-clicking a suitcase file launches Apple’s Font Book. That’s fine if you want to add the font to your system, but it’s not OK if you want to view a suitcase’s contents.

While the term font suitcase continues to be used, its purpose is no longer as valid or useful in OS X. The real difficulty is that some suitcases—particularly those inherited from earlier versions of Mac OS—often still contain many fonts that are more easily managed as single font faces. If one of your suitcases contains 18 faces—some of which may be bad or duplicated—and you can’t modify that suitcase, you have a serious file management problem as well as a larger font management problem.

To avoid this font management problem, Smasher allows you to break font suitcases into their individual faces or styles.