Does anyone understand fonts?

11 responses total.

( need fonts for dummies...). OK. I've just upgraded to MS WORD 98 for
Mac.  It seems to have tons of fonts, but they are not in the fonts file
in the system folder: they are hidden somewhere. I'd like to use some of
my old (common ) conts like Times, and Times New Roman, but they are not
to be found in WORD 98. I'm sorta interested in why, but mostly I'd like
to add them back in. They *are* in that fonts folder. Can I do this and,
if so, how?  (HELP doesn't help at all.) 

On a related matter, does anyone know of a way to get Better Telnet to use
a bold font?  I would be happy if I could create "Courier New Bold" to use
instead of "NCSA VT Bold".

Re #1 - they weren't hidden, they were truncated. I keep forgetting about the
128 font limit for the MacOS. Times was in the font file, but below the 128
cutoff. This is really frustrating. Every time one installs a new
application it installs a bunch of funky fonts, and since they go in
alphabetically the font folder just expands, and you can't tell what
the new fonts are. Now I go in and just pull out fonts I don't recognize as
ones I might want - had to extract 65 after upgrading to WORD 98. Is there
some better way to manage this? I really don't have any idea what most of the
one's I pulled out look like. Is there a good font manager for dealing
with this problem?

Re #2: Yes. Go to Session/Font or Session/Bold_Font . (I haven't ever
made any changes, so I am not sure what the difference is in choosing
in the Font or Bold_Font menus, since they are the same.0

Session/Bold font selects the font to use when the VT100 is in bold font
mode.  The list of fonts it presents are all plain fonts, with the exception
of NCSA VT Bold, which is a plain font as far as Mac OS knows.

There are a couple of dozen or so bold fonts in my Font folder. I suppose
I should try this, to see what happens. But I don't really care....

Back to fonts on Macs... Looking into it further, I find the 128 limit is
on separate entities in the Fonts folder, - fonts + suitcases. You can,
however, have as many fonts in a suitcase as you wish (well, up to some 16
MBs worth). Applications, however, only read down as far as the first 128
entities. The problem then arises what to do with a situation of
originally (say) 220 entities, almost all of which are suitcases with up
to 30 fonts.

I obtained and ran FontAgent 8 on my HD, and it found 20 MB of duplicate
fonts (scattered all over applications) and put the rest in the Fonts
folders - all 220 of them. I then consolidated as many as had duplicate
first names (Boldoni, Boldoni Bold, etc), which cut that to 189
entitities. Then I moved out 61 with names that I didn't know or sounded
like fonts I would not use, to leave 128. Those I removed are now just in
storage - but I *might* need one: no telling what funny fonts someone
might use where it matters (my online banking site requires use of Times
New Roman and Courier in its setup). It is supposed to slow things down to
have lots of fonts in the Fonts folder, but now I'm only holding out 5 MB
of fonts from 20 total, so I might as well have them all there. So, what
is the best way to distribute all those fontss into fewer suitcases than
189? 

It only occurs to me to simply do it alphabetically - say have suitcases
for font names beginning with aa to am, an to az, ba to bm, etc. That
would cut it to 52 suitcases: no problem. A little hard to pluck out
single font sets, but I don't know why one would want to. 

The manuals - online and paper - are the most useless sources of
information on what is the best to do. The Mac OS Help (even in 8.6) is
most useless - doesn't even mention fonts. The books are very verbose
about details of fonts that I thought Macs were invented to prevent the
user from knowing about (bitmapped, screen, printer, truetype, postscript,
kerning, proportional, leading, tracking, ligatures......PHOOEY!)), but
absent good advise on how to organize them.

How do you suggest organizing fonts in suitcases?

I'd suggest wrapping each font in underwear or a sock to prevent breakage.

I thought "wrappers" were only used in Unix. I'm in Mac. 

So...after a too-long battle, I have 73 suitcases in the Fonts folder,
holding all my 200+ fonts. The battle was because the process of
consolidating fonts into alphabetical suitcases ran into problems (twice,
a suitcase I was trying to drop back into Fonts just disappeared - Font
Agent found one and for the other I had to reload Adobe Acrobat). After
the problem with the Adobe fonts I decided to only consolidate TrueType
and bimapped fonts, and leave the PostScript font paira alone. My final
successful technique was to create empty suitcases, copy and paste
alphabetical groups of suitcases to a buffer folder (which removed them
from the Fonts folder), and then copy them over to the lettered suitcase,
before dumping that back into Fonts. Skipping the buffer folder copied the
suitcases to the lettered suitcase, but did not simultaneously remove them
from the Fonts folder. 

Font Agent makes this possible - it can gather together fonts from
wherever they are on the HD and put them in the Fonts folder in
alphabetical order, with the options of keeping them in the suitcases you
had chosen to put them in, or just as (many more) separate font-type
suitcases. I completely lost a suitcase of n* fonts, but Font Agent
scooped it out from wherever it had disappeared. (Font Agent also clears
out all duplicate fonts and fixes or removes corrupted one, and has some
other tricks.)

So, now I think I'll do something else and recover from fontitis. 

Gads!  The Mac OS is getting as bad as Windoze!  I don't have the kind of time
needed to sort fonts, etc., into suitcases and whatnot.  Yuck!  Time for
something simpler.

What does Windows do about fonts? Any problems with them?

There is a little history in the books about the fonts mess. The Mac
started with 10 bitmapped fonts (ar rather, typefaces, each named for a
city) - and that was it.  Eventually it permitted more, but you had to
deal with them with the D/A Mover - remember that? Then they came up with
the Laserwriter which permitted great resolution, which required a new
font system, called PostScript. Then, ATM came along with a new approach
to PS font printing which eremoved the "jaggies". However Adobe was making
the money now, not Apple, so Apple invented their own version of
PostScripot, called TrueType, and didn't have to buy PS technology from
Adobe. Ain't Free Enterprise Grand? 

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