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From: tim@ism780c.UUCP (Tim Smith)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: FLASH!!!  New/old rumors from BMUG BBS/MacQueue BBS!
Message-ID: <194@ism780c.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Dec-85 16:25:40 EST
Article-I.D.: ism780c.194
Posted: Tue Dec 24 16:25:40 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Dec-85 04:08:19 EST
References: <1256@cbdkc1.UUCP>
Reply-To: tim@ism780c.UUCP (Tim Smith)
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Santa Monica, CA
Lines: 38

In article <1256@cbdkc1.UUCP> gwe@cbdkc1.UUCP ( George Erhart x4021 CB 3D288 WDS ) writes:
> 
> Font Manager
> 
> Andy Hertzfeld has written the new Font Manager.  (An interesting
> bit of trivia is in order here.  Andy has apparently written four
> or five of these critters, of which this one was chosen for it's
> superiority.  Only a real nerd can get off on writing Font
> Managers enough to write four or five of 'em!) In general, most
> of the improvements are performance related.  There can now be
> 32,000 fonts, not the previous limit of 512.

This stuff was also on Compuserve, where the "real nerd" himself saw it,
and responded.  Here is his response:

------------------------- Begin Inserted Text -----------------------
Sb: #4967-#Mac+ Rumours
Fm: Andy Hertzfeld 70167,3430

I didn't really want to keep rewriting the font manager, but you 
have to remember that the Mac system has been evolving for more 
than five years now, and when you change one part of the system 
it often affects other parts.  The first two font managers kept 
fonts in their own separate files.  The third one made the major 
step of using the resource manager (around Fall 1982), the fourth 
one separated font family from size and used scaling (written in 
Jan 1983, it's the one in the old ROM).  Even though I had left 
Apple, I wrote the new one in the new ROM because I wanted a 
chance to fix some design mistakes in the earlier one.  The new 
one allows 65535 font families instead of 512, pre-stylized fonts 
and support for fractional pixel widths.  

   By the way, many of the QuickDraw speed improvements came from 
unwinding loops because more space was available in the ROM, 
although some were due to improved coding (like Ovals) -- Andy 
------------------------- End Inserted Text -------------------------
-- 
Tim Smith       sdcrdcf!ism780c!tim || ima!ism780!tim || ihnp4!cithep!tim