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July 20, 2003
A Kinder, Gentler Me (New Haxie)
I've been working on a new haxie lately. It's called FontCard (I would have loved to have named in MenuFonts instead). Anyways, it replaces the font menus in different applications with a custom one. All kinds of WYSIWYG goodness. It's no where near done yet, but it already does everything FontSight does right now. Except it works with Carbon applications. Currently only Carbon applications. There are so many different ways to to make a Font menu in Carbon that I had to rewrite the thing 3-4 times but it was a huge learning experience. Cocoa support is forthcoming and should not be difficult at all to implement. What would you like to see in a font menu? What would y'all be willing to pay for such a utility? It will cost more than $10 US. Below is a list of Applications I've tested it with (and it works with) and the issues I had. Of course, holding the shift key down when you open the font menu shows the original menu, unchanged. Also, it will only show fonts in it's menu that are in the application's original font menu. Adobe InDesign: Insane. I had to make FC work with InDesign from the get-go. I had to do it quickly because Adobe will not provide an Not For Retail (NFR) copy to me and I do not think it is worth the cash to pay for it since I do no design and I have no design talent so I was working off the time limited demo. InDesign is all kinds of weird because all of it's menu system. It is extremely dynamic. Menus are created when the menu is shown (or for submenus when the parent menu is shown). They are then destroyed when they are closed. This meant I had to rewrite FC to do all its work when the menu is being shown. FC uses a proxy system so all its items are proxies to the real items. For each real item, I have to find my fake item and vice versa. I thought I had it just right but InDesign adds a space to the name of each menu item. I have no idea why. It just seems silly to me so of course I had to remove it when I do the proxy matching. Also, because of InDesign's dynamic nature, it helped me find a lot of bugs that other applications would show in a seemingly random fashion. But it's also pretty slow in InDesign... 1.5 seconds for the first Font menu showing and about 763 or so milliseconds for each following showing. I must work on that some. Microsoft Word: they use a standard font menu whereas InDesign rolls it's own. In the first 2 versions, Word was the difficult application to get to work but then I got it to be very easy when I implemented better proxies. Ironically, FC does not work when WYSIWYG menus on in Word so they must be off. Barebones BBEdit: This was another odd one. BBEdit puts the sizes in the font menu first, then a separator item, then the font menu (AppendResMenu(), old school). Because of this non-standardish behaviour I had to teach FC to look at the first few items and leave them in unless they are not a font size so it doesn't work if something else is first or if a font is named "12". Worse, I patch the methods that set check marks and disable menu items so I can show that in my font menu but BBEdit calls SetitemMark and Enable/DisableMenuItem for every single menu item whenever something is done to the menus. This makes a huge delay after the initial font menu showing. I will either try to make this faster or make syncing marks an option, off by default for Barebone's applications. ATSUICurveAccessDemo: I choose this as an application to test because it uses a standard font menu and does very standard things. No serious problems, FC works quite well. Too bad no other applications use OS X standard Carbon font menus. Quark XPress: Description Forthcoming Did I miss anything? I was born on July 21st, 1981.   Posted by rosyna at July 20, 2003 08:11 PMTrackback Pings: TrackBack URL for this entry: Listed below are links to weblogs that reference A Kinder, Gentler Me (New Haxie): FontCard from Michael Tsai's Weblog Tracked on July 21, 2003 11:47 AM Give the Customer What They Want from mschindler.com Tracked on August 6, 2003 8:39 AM Related:
Comments
Please make sure we can order the menu how we like it. I might want my menu to show this: Font Menu > Web Design > Submenu of Fonts This is very important if you want to sell it to professionals. We like to organize our font menus like this. Similar to the Favorites in Apple's font tool. I'd love to beta test for you since I work with fonts all day for a living. Let me know! Posted by: Court Kizer on July 20, 2003 10:40 PMRosyna- "What would you like to see in a font menu? What would y'all be willing to pay for such a utility? It will cost more than $10 US." We've been talking about this on the InDesign beta list for some time. We'd like to see what kind of font we're working with (TrueType, PostScript, or OpenType) via a symbol next to the font's name, as well as those fonts used in the document listed first. Basically, we'd love all the functionality of the great OS 9 WYSIWYG Font Utility TypeTamer. More info on TypeTamer here: http://www.typetamer.com/features/features.cfm# Thanks! Posted by: Jamie McKee on July 21, 2003 3:46 AMThis sounds a lot like Adobe Type Reunion, something that I really miss in X. It would be great if it worked in Photoshop. $35 seems like a fair price for this product.
Sounds cool, I might be interested in buying it. $20 - $30 sounds cool. Posted by: NetworkShadow on July 22, 2003 12:06 PMI'm excited to hear you folks are working on a WYSIWYG font menu! I purchased FontSight, but most of my production apps are Carbon. I know my users will be pleased, especially since you're planning Carbon, Cocoa, and InDesign support from the get go. $35 would be a fair price, I'll register the day you release it. I'd probably pay up to $50 'cause I have an unhealthy software addiction. *grin* Posted by: Morgan Knicely on July 23, 2003 7:04 AMI'll buy it the day it comes out. People are VERY interested in getting back the features that Adobe Type Mangager and Type reunion offered. OSX implementation of font management is lame, at best. Posted by: John Hussar on July 30, 2003 6:10 AMWell if Apple stopped peeing on Carbon (from the top down) then maybethe APIs would be more fleshed out (*cough* Data Browser *cough*) and maybe we would use them instead of rolling our own. Of course we could all just throw all the code (and experience) out and start over in Cocoa and ObjectiveC (with quite possibly the worst syntax ever)! And then deal with all the NEW bugs, new ways to do things (try to dynamically make a menu in Cocoa and tell me how superior it is to Carbon). Good grief, I am so sick of this new Apple née NeXT that is forcing "old school" Mac devs out the window in order to validate that their way was superior despite being totally destroyed in the open competitive marketplace. What a contrast: DELL is run by a conservative not-quite-a-Baby Boomer and is top dog with decent Wintel products and support making money hand over fist. Apple is run by a baby-boomer flower child hard core liberal and is losing marketshare year over year DESPITE "switching" PC users up to 50% of current customers and remaking their OS to be just another UNIX with all the finesse of Windoze with its file type extensions, file path APIs instead of aliases and a severely fragmented API set that is divinding the community. What a great time to be a Mac user! I guess it could be worse, that damn UMAX S900 I have to use now is so filled with third-party bits of hardware it barely works under Mac OS 9 (gotta love OEM-only software drivers that got axed years ago). I give up... Posted by: Tim M. on August 7, 2003 10:57 AMI have been shocked by the inferior way OSX handles fonts compared with OS9. In fact, although I have both installed, I rarely use OS9 because I believe WYSIWYG menu display under Adobe Pagemaker with Power On Action WYSIWYG has been so helpful. I was really angry when I found out that there is no way to produce a WYSIWYG menu in InDesign under OSX! I would definitely pay for this utility ($30-50 not unreasonable at all, perhaps even $75.00!). Please make it happen and FAST! I Have CLEAR DOCK and would love to have aCLEAR MENUBAR.Is that possible? Posted by: Greg Lyman on October 9, 2003 1:26 AMThe one essential feature is that it support Adobe Photoshop. I've bought FontCard and it currently does not support Photoshop. If you nail photoshop, there will be a long sigh of relief and elation heard 'round the world. Posted by: Nathan Jacobson on May 15, 2004 6:21 PMKeep comments on topic. If a comment is unrelated to this post, it may be removed or moderated. |