FontBase issues with Teams & Google Drive

Questions
1

Circling back to this because this issue goes back to 2022 and there is still not a proper resolution in 2024. Having to make the hard choice to start looking at other options - even though we really like FB.

Recap

  • For Teams, we can’t put our FontBase root folder in Google Drive because then you CAN’T create Watch Folders.

  • If FontBase is installed locally user CAN use Watch Folders and connect to a Google Shared Drive where the fonts are all located. This also means we can see system fonts as well which is important.

  • If FontBase is local this means that Collections are also local; which hinders team progress. Auto-Sync Collections feature does not work because, in this scenario, to have Watch Folders work the root folder is installed locally. This breaks Collection sharing.

I understand that there are issues with Google Drive + symlinks that cause these issues but there has to be some kind of work-around or solution that can be implemented.

Proposed Solution

The best solution that I can think of would be to give an options for “Personal” and “Team” Collections.

Personal collections operate as normal, and work out of the FontBase root. Team collections should allow us to to do something like choose the folder location that it reads from; easy enough to choose a Drive Folder that it reads from. This would make sure that Team Members are all able to access the same fonts.

Or alternatively, let users set the save location for both Personal AND Team Collections so EVERYTHING is backed up.

2

The “workaround” we’re currently implementing is as follows:

  1. Organize all Fonts in a Google Team/Shared Drive based on place of acquisition (i.e MyFonts, Creative Market, etc.)

  2. Create a “Collections” Folder with appropriate sub-folders (i.e Holidays > Halloween, etc.)

  3. Go through the Fonts and create Google Shortcuts to them in the “Collections” folder.

  4. In FontBase, add “Collections” as a Watched folder.

This gives the ability to have actual Team fonts with Sub-Folders in G Drive; although it’s clunky to set up. In theory you could Skip 1 and 3 and just use Watched Folders but we like to have our overall repository backed up and then filtered without having to have duplicates.

We initially tried moving the “FontBase-Collections.json” and creating a shortcut to it (much like how Watched Folders work); however the program doesn’t recognize this and recreates a new one when it’s closed. :grimacing:

Having a shared Team Collection where the collection file exists on the Drive (we set the location) would probably be a smoother solution as mentioned in the OP. Having sub-folders for Collections would also be paramount.

3

Hello @syrehn, thank you for such a detailed post :pray:
And a separate thank you for the proposed solution :pray:
It makes a lot of sense indeed.
Will see what we can do in this respect to remedy the problem at least partially (having more control over the collections auto-sync file) :pray:
Thank you again,
Yuriy
FontBase Dev Team