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Saturday, December 14, 2002
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Ken (great name by the way) noticed that you can set the font panel preview text to anything you like. Simply double-click the preview and an edit field opens.
These posts on the fonts and the font panel have generated a lot of great feedback and suggestions. Thanks!
8:52:11 AM 
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The system font panel is a very flexible user interface for selecting and managing
collection of fonts. Whenever I demo this to even seasoned Mac OS X users, they
are blown away by the flexibility. All Cocoa applications use the font panel
implicitly and with the Jaguar release, Carbon applications can add it to their
feature set. Here's a series of screen shots that show the flexibility of the
panel.
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This is the font panel in it's "typical"
form. In a simple floating panel, you can browse fonts in collections,
families, type face and size.
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You can also preview fonts as well. Choose 'Show Preview'
in the Extras... popup.
Many people don't realize that you can slide the preview panel up and
down. There's a hot zone near the bottom of the preview. |
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A new feature in Jaguar.
Notice how the selection list and the slider are active at the same time
in this view?
Go to the Extras... menu and choose Edit Sizes'. There, you will find
a check box to enable these controls. |
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The font panel can also be made to be really simple. Simply
by reszing the window, user interface elements will get smaller and when
you reach a certain threshold, the window will simplify itself. For example,
here, the Collections list has been dropped because the width of the window
is reduced. |
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Reduce the height of the window (again, by resizing it) and
notice how the scrolling lists turn magically in to popups! (repost) |
8:31:06 AM
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One of the first tasks in designing the font technology foundation of Mac OS
X was to ensure that the architecture led to a high performance system and was
flexible enough to support a world of varied font formats. ATS, the Apple Type
Solution, centrally manages font management and rendering on behalf of the system
and applications, resulting in a memory efficient and fast platform for text
display. It is very flexible and can support major font formats including (repost):
- PostScript Type 1 - including double-byte formats used
for non-Roman languages
- Multiple Master - Jaguar supports any instances already
defined in the font
- TrueType - standard Mac resource based TrueType fonts
- TrueType (Windows) - cross platform font files with the
.ttf extension
- OpenType - improved PostScript format for Unicode fonts
- System fonts - TrueType fonts packed as .dfont files where
all font info is stored in the data fork
8:29:55 AM
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There are lots of great things to say about Fonts in Mac OS X and Jaguar specifically.
I think I'll dedicate this week of posts to everything related to fonts, fonts
and more fonts.
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First up on the font installation front - folders
of fonts! Instead of being forced to have all of your font files located
directly in your fonts folder, you can now group and organize your fonts
in folders. (repost) |
8:28:45 AM
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A top request we had from UNIX users and people that manage a network of Macs
was to increase the size of the "Short Name" for new accounts. This
is the name that can be used at the command line for authentication and with
Jaguar, it can be up to 255 characters long. (repost)
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