Mac Mania 4/MacMania 4.toast//Multimedia & Desktop/gsf-font-fischer/FontFischer - Read Me

Text File | 1993-01-07 | 9KB | 182 lines

RELEASE NOTES FOR FONTFISCHER



Here's a new twist: this is freeware I got paid for...

Here's what happened: I worked with Roy Fischer at a couple of
different type shops in the Boston area, and he took over a
thankless job I'd held when I moved on to another, different
thankless job. We talk frequently, sharing information about
business and the state of the prepress art. The other day he asked
if I knew of a way of generating a text-only list of all his fonts
by their true names. I said I didn't, but that I would be happy to
make something that would do the job - for a price.

The point being that, while it was a semi-interesting and to my
knowledge unsolved problem, it wasn't terrifically useful _to me_,
which is contrary to the case with most of my freeware stuff. I
said I'd do it with the understanding that I would probably release
the final product as freeware after a short period of exclusive
use. Roy waived the exclusivity, which was nice of him. And I
exceeded his original spec by a fair amount, adding enough value to
_make it_ useful to me (grin). Everybody wins. I get a little money
that I wouldn't have had otherwise. Roy gets his immediate problem
solved. And you get a little toy that may prove useful a time or
two. Roy's (company's) money got me to write software that I might
not otherwise have written, and certainly not within a day of the
request. There is a lesson in here for those people clamoring for
my attention by Email... (grin)



Okay, so what is it?

FontFischer writes a list of font names to a file of type TEXT. The
file can be plain text or fully-styled Quark XPress Tags. You can
use it to make a list of fonts, as Roy plans to do, or to make a
font specimen book.

FontFischer works like this: it goes through the currently open
FOND resources one by one and extracts the name of the FOND, which
is the true, font menu name of the font. The font names are written
out to the file in the order found, which means no particular order
at all. To make the best use of this, you'll want to sort the
FontFischer list in Word or some other software that does sorting.

FAIR WARNING #1: I've had nothing but trouble trying to sort in
Word 5.0. Word 4.0 is fast and flawless (as flawless as anything
out of MicroSoft, IAC, consistent in its inexplicable wierdness).

What to do: Load the suitcases for the fonts you want listed using
Suitcase or Master Juggler. Be sure to shut down any suitcases you
_don't_ want in the listing. Then double-click on FontFischer,
select your options and hit "Start...". A new file will be created
containing the list. Open this file from Word or some other
software that sorts and sort to alphabetical order, if you wish.
(Note: if you sort in Word, you'll need to Save As Text Only, since
Word thinks a text file, once sorted, yearns to be a binary file.)

FontFischer works under both Systems 7 and 6, and essentially runs
out of one dialog box. In that dialog are two sets of radio
buttons. The first, Text only and XPress Tags, controls which type
of file is written. Text only writes nothing but the font name, one
to a line. XPress Tags writes appropriate XPress Tags coding, so
that, when you Get Text into Quark, the font name will display in
that font.

FAIR WARNING #2: If you print an XPress Tags FontFischer list, be
sure to check 'Unlimited Downloadable Fonts'. If you don't your
printer will crash on a VMerror in very short order.

The second radio group, Unharmonized and Harmonized, controls what
FontFischer does about the FONDs that it finds. A Harmonized
suitcase is one in which all possible weights are stored _only_ as
styled variations of the base weight. In a normal, _unharmonized_
four-weight suitcase, there would be four FONDs - plain, italic,
bold and bold italic. Plain would reference all four weights,
italic would refrence itself and bold italic (as bold), bold would
reference itself and bold italic (as italic), and bold italic would
speak only of itself, a base narcissist. A _harmonized_ suitcase
includes only the FOND corresponding to plain. Harmonized suitcases
are made by Linotype and AGFA (their AT fonts), among others. Many
older Bitstream suitcases are harmonized. And your own suitcases
might be harmonized, if you've used something like Font Harmony to
make them so.

In any case, you should select the option for the type of suitcases
you have. For unharmonized fonts, FontFischer lists the name of the
plain weight only, since the other weights are plain weights in
their own FONDs. For harmonized fonts, FontFischer goes through the
FOND and adds the text "Italic", "Bold" and "Bold Italic", as
appropriate, for any styled weights.

Interesting tidbit: for harmonized fonts, we are intellgently
adding linefeed characters to force the sort ordering. Without this
gentle coercion, Bold and Bold Italic would sort before Italic,
which struck me as odd. Alas, there's nothing fast and convenient
we can do about unharmonized fonts; moreover, many of them have
sorting-hostile names (e.g., Helvetica, I Helvetica, B Helvetica,
BI Helvetica).

FAIR WARNING #3: Em Software's Xtags doesn't like linefeeds inside
angle brackets. I chose the linefeed character because it's one
that the XPress Tags filter always throws away. Xtags does, also,
in text. But within tags, Xtags reports an error. So: either search
for linefeeds in your word processor and replace with nothing after
you sort, or simply Get Text using the plain vanilla XPress Tags
filter. Do not run your file past PSPort or one of my many other
linefeed eaters (XP8, Torquemada); the linefeeds FontFischer
introduces will look to my software like Unix carriage returns and
will be treated as such.

Okay, but what if you have both harmonized and unharmonized
suitcases?

Simple. Load all of the harmonized suitcases and run. Then swap out
to all of the unharmonized suitcases and run again, saving under a
different name. Then concatenate the two files, using Cat o' Seven
Tails or some other catting software. Then do the sort. If you run
with XPress Tags, be sure to open _all_ of the suitcases before you
Get Text.

FAIR WARNING #4: FontFischer is not checking for font I.D.
conflicts. This is not a problem in a text-only list, but a
conflict may result in elemental wierdness when you Get Text into
Quark. Probably the best bet is to upgrade to Suitcase 2.0, which
resolves font I.D. conflicts on the fly.

FAIR WARNING #5: We are not doing anything about duplicate
listings, which can happen if your suitcases are really unhealthy.
Quick fix is to chop them out as you find them. Permanent fix is to
clean up your suitcases.

FAIR WARNING #6: Perhaps this goes without saying: we are not doing
anything about fonts that can't write their own names, so to speak,
in XPress Tags. In other words, it is incumbent upon you to deal
with situations like Symbol, Zapf Dingbats, Machine, and the many
Expert Sets. FontFischer is a meticulous moron; it will transcribe
the data perfectly and understand nothing. So you will need to scan
the FontFischer list looking for situations that require human
intelligence.



Sorry about all those fair warnings. If I were a big software
company, my marketing types would paint the features in technicolor
and let the tech support people issue disclaimers _ad hoc_, after
47 minutes on hold (grin). I hate that stuff as much as you, and I
think you have a right to know what the software does and doesn't do.

Truly, though, it's a cute toy, even if it won't see much use.

Here's a wrinkle: because the files are so clean, they are eminently
Torqueable. In the XPress Tags variations, I'm forcing a default
style, called "body", just to make it easy to globally change the
specs of the imported list. With Torquemada, you could play off the
consistency to make a full-blown type book, with alphabets and
sample settings. There are Torquemada sets enclosed that do this,
after a fashion. (If you use them, be sure to run them separately,
not all together in a batch. Each one introduces so much text that,
used together, they would cause a massive buffer-bounding error.
Instead, run "TypeBook in a TorqueSet" on the original FontFischer
file, then run "Add an Alphabet" on the ".TQM" file, then run "Add
a Text Showing" on the ".TQM.TQM" file.)

That's it. If you have an idea for software that you'd like
to see done sooner rather than later: money talks, and I have
reasons for listening more closely than usual just now (grin).



Very Best,

Greg Swann

CIS: 70640,1574

P.O. Box 1724
Andover, MA 01810

1/7/93