Font Gander Pro will operate usefully under any version of system software from 7.0 on up, on any PowerMac or Macintosh of MacII class or higher. To enjoy its full functionality, you should also have Macintosh Drag and Drop installed (introduced as an extension in System 7.1, and now part of the standard MacOS), 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 Font Gander Pro as a compressed file on a floppy disk, decompress it straight to your hard drive. DO NOT decompress the file onto the floppy itself. Certain drag-and-drop functions are disabled for programs residing on floppies, and sometimes, when such a program is transferred to a hard drive, these functions remain disabled. This can affect any drag-happy program, and you will know it because the program no longer opens files when you drag the files to the program icon. If this happens to you, you must 'rebuild the desktop' by holding down the command and option keys at startup. It's better just to always install straight to hard drives.
• You can install or move Font Gander Pro anywhere you like on the hard drive. It needs no special relationship to the System Folder, and does not modify the operating system in any way. (Some functions may not work if you run it on a locked or read-only drive.)
• Keep Font Gander Pro in its own folder, so it can find the "Gander Plug-ins" sub-folder. To be neat & tidy, you should also keep the "Gander Quill" files in the Font Gander Pro folder.
• Make one or more aliases of Font Gander Pro for handy access:
- If you have a recent version of system software, with window-to-window drag-and-drop capability, place a Gander alias in the Apple Menu Items folder (inside the System Folder). That way, you'll be able to launch the program easily from your Apple Menu, and then load fonts by dragging the files or folders right into one of Gander's windows.
- If you have an older version of system software, you should place a Gander alias on your desktop, so you can easily drag files and folders directly onto the Gander alias icon.
◊ Overview
Font Gander began its life as a simple solution to an old System 7 shortcoming, a shortcoming which lingers today in System 7's descendents. When the revolutionary OS first appeared, it delighted everyone with dozens of new features, among which was the ability to view fonts by double-clicking on the font files, even fonts that weren't installed in the OS. However, as the novelty wore off, people found this feature to be more tantalizing than satisfying. The Mac Finder shows you only one measly little window with one line of text (or 3 measly lines, if it's a TrueType font), and there are no options to increase the point size or to see the entire character set, which is often exactly what you need to see, to make your double-click worthwhile. People wanted more. Font Gander Pro offers more.
With Font Gander Pro, 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 Pro's windows (except in print mode). This causes Gander to load the fonts and spring into the foreground, instantly giving you numerous viewing options, a hundred times better than the Finder offers. A further advantage is that Font Gander Pro can display Type-1 PostScript fonts just as smooth and crisp as TrueTypes (provided you have Adobe Type Manager installed), and Font Gander Pro can print beautiful sampler sheets - something no other software can do without installing the fonts first.
Although the printing functions have grown enormously since the release of the first Font Gander in September of 1996, the program's main interface has remained essentially unchanged. It's a strange interface that can only be explained in the context of giving you a quick, easy, and satisfying view of your non-installed fonts. The main window grows and shrinks, there's a grab-anywhere mover hand instead of a dragable titlebar, the text sometimes explodes to giant size and slides across your screen-- Well, it's hard to describe. See the "Guided Tour" section below.
As for the printing, that began life more as a "show-off" feature than anything else. Everyone said it was impossible to reliably print non-installed fonts, so we decided to prove them wrong. Initially we offered a single built-in layout, printing just one font at a time. When the public demanded more printing options, we puzzled for a while over how to integrate these weighty features with the basic lighthearted "take a gander" theme. That's what led us to isolate the printing functions in external "plug-in" files. Also, plug-ins allow for much easier extensibility; the ability to add new printing layouts at any time without re-writing the main program.
But how to create new plug-ins? They can be surprisingly difficult for a programer to write, unless the process is highly systematized. And if one does a good job of systematizing the process, one can write a small but highly specialized sort of page-layout program which lets anybody create new plug-ins, not just programmers. In the long run, this is easiest of all. Therefore, we created Gander Quill.
Gander Quill has its own documentation, and a brief tutorial, so we won't say much about it here. But this, in a nutshell, is the whole Gander printing scheme:
- You create your own layouts in Gander Quill (or modify existing layout documents, or simply open them as-is).
- You select "Build Plug-in" from Quill's file menu. This turns the layouts into Font Gander Pro plug-ins.
- You save or drag the resulting plug-ins into the "Gander Plug-ins" folder, so that Gander Pro can find them next time you launch it.
If you don't want to learn anything about Gander Quill, you at least need to know that. Just open the Quill layouts, build the plug-ins, and put the plug-ins where Font Gander Pro can find them. It's easy as 1 - 2 - 3.
Font Gander plug-ins should be considered 'perishable goods'. We recently changed the file format, causing old plug-ins to become obsolete, and we're likely to change it again. But the Quill layout documents should last forever. Don't throw your custom Quill layouts away!
◊ Guided Tour
• Launch Font Gander Pro. You'll 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. This is a "drop-box" window, for handy loading of fonts via drag-and-drop (we'll get to that later). Drag it into position where it won't be obscured by other windows when it's in the background. Now double-clilck on it. Suddenly the main window reappears. The second button on the toolbar gives you a small 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.
• Try the menus. The Windows menu first. You'll see an item called "Grid View". When you select that item, the main window suddenly changes from lines of text to a square gridwork of characters, all 256 characters in the current font. Click the magnifier anywhere on the grid, and suddenly the character underneath springs up in huge dimensions (you can make it even bigger in the preference settings). The key-combination for that character is shown in the lower left (not guaranteed with all characters; we've ignored control-key combos, delete and spacebars, and it hasn't been tested with all keyboard layouts). If you magnify with your shift key down, you'll see the ASCII number in place of the keyboard combo. By typing on your keyboard, you'll see the corresponding characters blinking on the grid. If you hold down your spacebar or option key, the magnifier temporarily reverts to a grabber, so you can move the window without switching tools in the toolbar.
• 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. Now drag the window upward and toward the left, until 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 to postage-stamp size, 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 example. 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?
• 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 - just drag font files or folders from the Finder into any of Gander's windows (usually the drop-box when Gander is in the background), or onto the application icon (or alias), or use the "Open" menu. This is where the fun really begins. We'll let you experiment on your own. But as you do, notice how the font menu sorts new font names, and selects the newest one you add. By typing the tab key, you page down through the fonts; shift-tab pages you up. Be aware that you can't load fonts from your "Fonts" folder, nor any other fonts which are already opened by the System or another utility. The Gander is cautious about this, and very safe. Also, obviously, you can't load the same font twice, but feel free to use the File menu's "Close All Files" command, to start your experiments all over again. In a fairly short time, you might find your own particular way of using the interface to its best advantage. Some people can't stand the big window filling their screen, so they keep it small and always use the magnifier. Some people keep it so small, they disable the "Auto Minimize/Maximize" setting in the Preferences. Whatever works for you, it's okay. The baby-simple interface conceals a lot of versatility.
• Here's a nice smooth segue to the subject of printing: While you're experimenting with drag-and-drop font loading, try holding your option key down, making sure it's down at the moment of 'drop' (when you let your mouse button up). What happens? Gander springs to the fore, the cursor spins, but then, suddenly, your printer driver's print job dialog box comes up, asking how many copies you want, in what page range, etc. Click the Cancel button, please. We just wanted you to see that the option key sends drag-dropped fonts straight to the printer. Fonts which are loaded that way do not get placed on Gander's Font menu. They're printed, and then immediately purged from memory. But this doesn't tell you anything about the layout template they're printed in, or other options. For that, we need to shift gears somewhat.
• Select "Page Setup / Print" from the File menu. This is the more conventional way of printing. Suddenly the program goes into a totally different mode of operation. Drag-and-drop is temporarily disabled, as are the menus and the tools, but a list of available fonts is there, and a thumbnail preview of the default sampler page layout. If you select one or more fonts in the list, the "OK" button turns into a "Print" button, and you'll be printing a sampler sheet in the layout shown. To change the current layout, use the popup menu in the lower left (this change will also apply if you dismiss the print window, and instead use the drag-and-drop printing method mentioned above). Click the "Setup" button to invoke your printer driver's Page Setup dialog. Each layout retains its own printer settings, so the landscapes won't repeatedly acquire portrait orientation, for instance. You might have to check the settings whenever you use a layout for the first time, but after that, you shouldn't have to bother with it ever again. The layouts (all but the "Classic Gander" layout) are actually stored in small "Plug-in" files, separate from the Font Gander Pro application file itself. The plug-ins must reside in the application folder, in a sub-folder called "Gander Plug-ins". If "Classic Gander" is all you see in the popup list, your plug-in folder is empty or missing, or it contains obsolete plug-ins. In any case, you can always make new up-to-date plug-ins by opening the layout template files in Gander Quill, and choosing "Build Plug-in" from the File menu. Or you can create your own layouts in Gander Quill, totally original works, and perhaps send them to us so we can share them with the world.
• That's all we'll say here about Gander Quill. It has its own documentation, and an even better guided tour (the "Online Tutorial"), so we'll refer you to that. But there's one more thing you should see in Font Gander Pro. Go to the Windows menu and select "Handy Reference". You'll get a window with scrollable text, a popup menu of topics, and a "Save…" button. Now that you've finished Getting Started, you can find more information in that Reference, or you can save the text to disk for printout or perusal just like this. Hopefully, it will answer any further questions you have.
