MacWorld 1997 January

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Text File | 1996-09-25 | 14KB | 263 lines

Font Gander --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Version: 1.0 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright ©1995-1996, Hugh Johnson --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contact and Feedback: As of this writing (Sept.96), my most reliable Email address is: hugh.johnson@dtp.mmbbs.com For true reliability (the postman always rings twice) write: Hugh Johnson 7925 6th St NE Spring Lake Park, MN 55432 USA Comments and bug reports are welcome. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- System Requirements: Font Gander will operate usefully under any version of System 7. This is its only absolute requirement - System 7.0 or above. To enjoy its full functionality, you should also have Macintosh Drag and Drop (intro- duced as an extension in System 7.1, and now part of the standard MacOS 7.5), and Adobe Type Manager, version 3.0 or higher (freely available at numerous sites, typically bundled with Adobe's Acrobat Reader). And of course, you should have some font files lying around, uninstalled - the more, the merrier. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Installation: If you received this program on a floppy disk, simply copy the appli- cation to your hard drive. This needs to be said because drag-and- drop launching will not operate correctly for programs running off of floppies (it's a hopeless bug in the Mac OS). --------------------------------------------------------------------------- What It's For: Font Gander began its life as a solution to a problem that's as old as System 7 itself. The problem is, if you want to see what a given font looks like, and you don't care to go to the trouble of instal- ling the font just for a quick peek, the System 7 Finder gives you an easy way to do it - but it's more tantalizing than satisfying, and ultimately leads to frustration. In the Finder, if you double- click on a font, you'll just get one measly little window with one measly line of text (or three measly lines, if it's a TrueType font), and there are no options to increase the point size or view the whole extended-ASCII character set, which is often exactly what you _need_ to see, to make your double-click worthwhile. You want more. Font Gander gives you more. Lots more. With Font Gander, you just drag your font files onto the Gander icon - or if Gander is already running and if you have Macintosh Drag and Drop in your system (all recent systems have it), you can drag the font files into any of Font Gander's windows (except the Print Preview window). This causes Gander to load the font and spring into the fore- ground, instantly giving you numerous viewing options, a million times better than the Finder offers. Another advantage over the Finder is that Gander can display Type-1 PostScript fonts just as smooth and crisp as TrueTypes (provided you have Adobe Type Manager installed), and the Gander can print out beautiful sampler sheets, or can save them to disk as high-resolution PICT or TIFF files. At present, Font Gander is evolving more and more toward this print- ing functionality (more on that later), but it's still firmly founded on the idea of giving you a quick, easy, and satisfying view of your uninstalled fonts. This explains its basic interface - admittedly, a rather strange interface. The main window grows and shrinks, there are no scrollbars or titlebar, the text sometimes explodes to giant size and slides across your screen-- well, it's hard to describe. Let's just take it for a test-drive... --------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Brief Tour of a Strange Interface: 1)Double-click on the Gander icon. You will see a splash-screen come and go, and then a simple toolbar and an even simpler main window. When you try the first button on the toolbar, you'll see that it shrinks the window into a tiny Gander portrait which can be dragged anywhere on the screen. Double-click on this portrait, and suddenly the main window reappears. The second button on the toolbar gives you a grabber-hand, with which you can drag the main window anywhere. The third button on the toolbar gives you a magnifying glass, and when you click this magnifier and hold the mouse button down on one of the lines of text, a huge ribbon of text appears, sliding left and right as you move the mouse. 2)Try the menus. The Windows menu first. You'll see an item called "Grid View". When you try it, the main window suddenly changes from lines of text to a big square gridwork of characters - all 256 characters in the current (default) font. Click the magnifier anywhere, and suddenly the character underneath springs up in huge dimensions (you can make it even bigger in the preference settings). If you hold down the spacebar or option key, the magnifier temporar- ily turns back into a grabber, so you can move the window without switching tools in the toolbar. 3)Let's skip over to the "Style" menu now. It looks rather ordinary, you say? Alright, just for kicks, select a huge font size. Suddenly the main window expands to fill your computer screen. Don't worry - you can drag it with your grabber tool, and bring every inch of it into view, one screenful at a time. This is much faster than scrolling. This explains why the main window isn't designed like a conventional scrolling document window; instead, this combines optimal viewing area with optimal speed and optimal magnification. Drag the window upward and toward the left, till you can only see a few characters in its lower-right corner. Now, change the font size back to the default, or set it all the way down to 4 points if you like. What happened? It looks like the window shrank away from the screen. Come to think of it, it should have shrunken so much, it would be totally off-screen! But it isn't. Even if the window shrinks down not much bigger than a postage stamp, there's just enough left showing to pull it back with the grabber hand. This is because the window is "pinned" to the main screen. You can change this setting in the preferences, too, if you'd like to keep the window on another monitor, for instance. In that case, if the window _does_ go far astray, you'll need to jump back to the Windows menu, where there's an option to "Fetch Stray Windows". Are things starting to make sense now? 4)Check out the "Font" menu. All your installed fonts are there, of course, but the first three menu items tell you how to add more. This is where the fun really begins. I'll let you experi- ment on your own. But as you do, notice how the font menu sorts new font names, and selects the newest one you add. Be aware you can't load fonts from your "Fonts" folder, nor any other fonts which are already opened by the System or another utility. The program will only beep if you try to open an already-opened file. Depending on your preference settings, it will also beep if it detects a font ID conflict, so be aware that it won't _always_ load the font you want to see, but it's safe. Feel free to experiment. You'll soon find your own way of using the program to its fullest advantage. Some people can't stand the huge window filling their screen, so they keep it small and use the magnifier all the time. Some people keep the window so small, they disable the "Auto-Minimize/Maximize" setting. Whatever works for you, it's okay. The baby-simple interface conceals a lot of versatility. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Points to Consider: • A font "suitcase" file is not the same as a folder. Although the Finder allows you to open it like a folder, and you can see things that look like individual files inside, it is NOT a folder, and those are NOT independent font files until you drag them out of the suitcase file. This is an important distinction, because Font Gander only opens true files - i.e., the suitcases themselves, or the inner font files _after_ they've been dragged out of the suitcases to another directory. In short, you cannot grab an indi- vidual font from a suitcase and drag it into a Gander window. It won't work (although it won't hurt if you try). • If you have Adobe Type Manager (ATM), and you want to view Type-1 PostScript fonts at large sizes without 'jaggles', you must keep the high-resolution vector files in the same folder where the screen fonts reside. This is the typical way that all Type-1 font utilities operate. When Gander opens a PostScript screen font, it tells ATM where to look for the vector version, but it has no way of "knowing" where the vectors are beyond "assuming" that they're in the same folder with the screen font. • In the Preferences, there is a setting to favor TrueTypes over bitmaps. This forces the fonts to be drawn using TrueType vectors even if an appropriately-sized bitmap resource is present. The disadvantage is that drawing will be slower. The big advantage is that all the characters in all your fonts will look the same at all sizes. Without it, you may sometimes notice that, for instance, a 12-point Geneva "Ÿ" looks entirely different when you magnify it to giant size. This option is disabled for the sake of speed on slower Macs, but I recommend that you enable it if you have a fast machine. • In the Preferences, there is an option to disable zoom-rects, but if you don't have Macintosh Drag and Drop in your system, you'll never see zoom-rects in the first place, so you might scratch your head wondering what it's all about. Don't worry. Zoom-rects are merely cosmetic frills, not important in the least. • To repeat: the Gander will not open fonts which are already open, will not open fonts dragged directly from suitcase files, and will not open fonts dragged to its icon if it's running on a floppy. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Future Directions: -IMPROVED ERROR REPORTING- When I wrote the routines to detect open files and ID conflicts and the like, I left the door open to add plain-English explanations instead of mere error beeps. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. -FASTER LAUNCHING- If you have tons of installed fonts, it can slow down program launches merely because the System has to sort all those names when it adds fonts to the menu. Certain utilities that twiddle with the Font menu (to show WYSIWYG typefaces, etc.) can slow the process down even more. So I think I'll make it an option to ignore installed fonts, and you'll only have a blank font menu to start with, and you can only load non-installed fonts. But this would be an option that you could disable, so you could still "take a gander" at your installed fonts, just the same as now. -FASTER PRINTING/MORE OPTIONS- I don't want to spell things out too explicitly here. Suffice it to say that, as the Gander's printing capabilities grow, the program becomes somewhat schizophrenic, and I might have to split it into two different programs - one that's quick and easy for fast screen viewing, and one that does heavy-duty high-rez printing. If that happens, I pledge that registered users will be fully licensed to own both programs, just the same as if they had remained a single program. -ON-THE-FLY FONT ID CONFLICT RESOLUTION- I could do this pretty easy, I think, but unfortunately it has to wait for the other things to get done first... Or maybe I'll get deluged with requests to do it sooner, you never know. -TEMPORARY LOADING OF... SHHH! QUIET! THAT'S A SECRET!- This is a biggie. So big, I can't talk about it at all. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Fine Print: Font Gander carries no warranties, expressed or implied. To the best of my knowledge, it contains no "bugs" that could bomb your computer or cause damage to your files, but I cannot guarantee that such a thing will never happen in the extremely complex environment of a modern computer operating system. It is up to you, as a shareware consumer, to evaluate the program's stability before you buy. This is one of the greatest strengths of the shareware concept. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Even Finer Print: - "Macintosh" is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. - "PostScript", "Acrobat", and "Adobe Type Manager" are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems, Inc. - The gander's name is "Jerome", but only his mother calls him that. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bottom Line: Font Gander is priced at $10 (US). In this package, there should be a PICT-format order form for you to print out and fill in. If it's missing, all you really need to do is send me your name as you would like it to appear in Font Gander's "About" box and toolbar. The name must be at least 6 characters long and no more than 31 characters. (When I say "characters", I mean letters, spaces, punctuation - they all count, and must total no less than 6, no more than 31.) So, send me $10 with your name, and address, and I'll mail you back a password code to register the program. (When I say "address", I mean a genuine, physical street address. A 'snail-mail' address. I cannot guarantee delivery to an e-mail address.) Once again, my address: Hugh Johnson 7925 6th St NE Spring Lake Park, MN 55432 USA Make the check payable to me. Include your phone number if it's a per- sonal check. Sorry, I cannot accept foreign money-orders or checks. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Live Long and Prosper Th-Th-Th-That's All, Folks!