Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!rutgers!umn-d-ub!cs.umn.edu!kanefsky From: kanefsky@cs.umn.edu (Steve Kanefsky) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Font menu SANITY!! Message-ID: <1990Mar12.234628.22333@cs.umn.edu> Date: 12 Mar 90 23:46:28 GMT References: Organization: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis - CSCI Dept. Lines: 53 In article ls1i+@andrew.cmu.edu (Leonard John Schultz) writes: >I have alot of screenfonts, but the way the Mac puts different styles >into the font menus is very confusing. For example, the LetterGothic >show up in the menu as: >B Letter Gothic Bold >BI Letter Gothic Bold Italic >I Letter Gothic Italic >Letter Gothic > >where Times just shows up as Times. > >My question is, why do the different styles for some fonts show up in >the font menu and others don't. The menu gets increadibly cluttered >with a significant number of fonts. It's not the Mac's fault that your fonts have separate menu entries for each style variation. That's just the way Adobe (and perhaps other type vendors) distributes them. When you think about it, a true italic or bold typeface really is separate from the plain style of that typeface. Unfortunately, many Mac users have become accustomed to the standard quickdraw way of generating italics (i.e. just slant all the plain characters over towards the right. Yuck!). Originally, the only way to display *real* italics and other style variations was to have separate fonts, hence "I Letter Gothic Italic" (I guess the preceding "I" (or "B" or "BI" or "C", etc.) is so all similarly- styled fonts will be grouped together in the fonts menu). However, now that NFNTs have come along, it is possible to have "families" of fonts, with the relationships between fonts made explicit in the NFNT resource. With the aid of utilities like Font Harmony, you can merge all your style variations into a single NFNT and get true italics on-screen in the usual way (choose the font, then the italic style). Personally, I like having the individual styles in the font menu (as long as I can access the fonts in a dialog box with a scrolling list, since long scrolling menus are slow and difficult to deal with). Additionally, you can replace your Apple-supplied Times, Palatino, etc. fonts with the Adobe-supplied NFNT versions, and get true italics on-screen (and you won't need to use Font Harmony, just Font/DA mover 3.8). The reason style variations of these fonts have never appeared in your menus is because Apple doesn't even supply the styled versions of the screen fonts. Finally, you can also use Adobe Type manager to reduce your menu clutter. Just install ATM and only the plain versions of the screen fonts and ATM will be able to generate the styled versions using the downloadable printer fonts (although not as nicely as bitmap fonts at small point sizes). Hope this helps, -- Steve Kanefsky kanefsky@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu