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From: stoms@castor.ncgia.ucsb.edu (David Stoms)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Font styles proposal
Summary: the Mac needs a better Font Manager!
Keywords: font style idea
Message-ID: <5520@hub.ucsb.edu>
Date: 27 May 90 23:30:42 GMT
Sender: news@hub.ucsb.edu
Reply-To: stoms@castor.ncgia.ucsb.edu ()
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Organization: U. C. Santa Barbara, Geography Department
Lines: 34

It occured to me that there shouldn't be fixed styles. Each font should
carry its own set of styles plus there should be some sort of code
resource to style a font if that font doesn't directly support the wanted
style. For example, if you wanted a Extra-Bold-Italic, but the font in
use only had extra-bold, the Font Mgr would generate a nice extra-bold
using the Font (I suppose I'm talking about TrueType or ATM) then run
the image through a italicizer.

The benefits of this scheme are vast... Instead of a standard set of
radio buttons to list styles, each font would have a list of styles
just like the size list works now. If a style is built into the font,
the style would be outlined, otherwise it would be normal type.

To elaberate, the toolbox traps might look like this:

Equivolent size traps for styles,
 pascal void GetStyleName(short sNum, Str255 theName);
 pascal short GetStyleNum(Str255 theName);
 pascal Boolean RealStyle(short fontNum, short sNum);

To replace TextFace,
 pascal void AddStyle(short sNum);
 pascal void RemoveStyle(short sNum);
 pascal void PlainStyle();

In addition, a new code resource would need to be specified to transform
fonts, outlines or bitmaps. How about 'FTFM' (font transform)? There
should also be calls to change style options (ie, how many degrees to
rotate).

Thats all I can think of so far. Hopefully, Apple is working on something
like this already but if they aren't, they should be!

Josh.