Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals)

2017-07-07 02:10:07

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14.7. Fonts ”and Font Book

Over the years , Macintosh fonts have improved considerably. No longer must you pray to the printer gods that your beautiful flyer won't come out with jagged-looking type because you chose the wrong font type , one that doesn't have smooth edges.

Figure 14-10. Each account holder can have a separate set of fonts; your set is represented by the User icon. You can drag fonts and font families between the various Fonts folders represented here: from your User account folder to the Computer icon, for example, making it available to all account holders.

Mac OS X delivers type that is all smooth, all the time . Fonts in Tiger's formats ” called TrueType, PostScript Type 1, and OpenType ”always look smooth onscreen and in printouts, no matter what the point size .

Tiger comes with a program that's just for installing, removing, inspecting, and organizing fonts. It's called Font Book (Figure 14-10), and it's in your Applications folder.

14.7.1. Where Fonts Live

If you're used to Mac OS 9 or Windows , one of the most confusing changes is that there's no longer one single Fonts folder for your computer. There are now five Fonts folders. The fonts you actually see listed in the Fonts menus and Font panels of your programs are combinations of these Fonts folders' contents. They include:

your private fonts (your Home folder Library Fonts) . This Fonts folder sits right inside your own Home folder. You're free to add your own custom fonts to this folder. Go wild ”it's your font collection and yours alone. Nobody else who uses the Mac can use these fonts, and will never even know that you have them.

Main font collection (Library Fonts) . This, for all intents and purposes, is the equivalent of the traditional Fonts folder. Any fonts in this folder are available to everyone to use in every program. (As with most features that affect everybody who shares your Macintosh, however, only people with Administrator accounts are allowed to change the contents of this folder.)

Network fonts (Network Library Fonts) . In certain corporations, a network administrator may have set up a central font collection on another computer on the network, to which your Mac and others can "subscribe." The beauty of this system, of course, is that everybody on the network can rely on a consistent set of fonts. (In this case, the Network "folder" is represented by the Network icon in your Sidebar.)

Essential system fonts (System Library Fonts) . This folder contains the fonts that the Mac itself needs: the typefaces you see in your menus, dialog boxes, icons, and so on. You can open this folder to see these font suitcases, but you can't do anything with them, such as opening, moving, or adding to them. Remember that, for stability reasons, the System folder is sealed under glass forever. Only the superuser (Section 12.9) can touch these files ”and even that person would be foolish to do so.

Classic fonts (Mac OS 9 System Folder Fonts) . Mac OS X automatically notices and incorporates any fonts in the System Folder that you've designated for use by the Classic environment (Chapter 6). This folder is also, of course, the source of fonts that appear in the Font menus of your Classic programs.

With the exception of the essential system fonts, you'll find an icon representing each of these locations in your Font Book program, described next .

Note: And just to make life even more exciting, Adobe's software installers may donate even more fonts to your cause, in yet another folder: your Home Application Support folder.

14.7.2. Font Book: Installing and Managing Fonts

One of the biggest perks of Mac OS X is its preinstalled collection of over 50 great-looking fonts ”"over $1,000 worth," according to Apple, which licensed many of them from type companies. In short, fewer Mac users than ever will wind up buying and installing new fonts.

But when you do buy or download new fonts, you're in luck. There's no limit to the number of fonts you can install.

14.7.2.1. Looking over your fonts

Right off the bat, Font Book is great for one enjoyable pursuit: looking at samples of each typeface. Click Computer, for example, click the first font name , and then press the down-arrow key. As you walk down the list, the rightmost panel shows you a sample of each font (Figure 14-10).

You can also open any font family's flippy triangle (or highlight its name and then press the right arrow) to see the font variations it includes: Italic, Bold, and so on.

Tip: When you first open Font Book, the actual text of the typeface preview(in the right panel) is pretty generic. Don't miss the Preview menu, though. It lets you substitute a full display of every character (choose Repertoire) ”or, if you choose Custom, it lets you type your own text, as illustrated in Figure 14-10.

14.7.2.2. Eliminating duplicates

Since your Mac accesses up to five folders containing fonts, you might wonder what happens in the case of conflicts . For example, suppose you have two slightly different fonts, both called Optima, which came from different type companies, and are housed in different Fonts folders on your system. Which font do you actually get when you use it in your documents?

The scheme is actually fairly simple: Mac OS X proceeds down the list of Fonts folders in the order shown above, beginning with your own home Fonts folder. It only acknowledges the existence of the first duplicated font it finds.

If you'd rather have more control, open Font Book. A bullet ( ¢) next to a font's name is Font Book's charming way of trying to tell you that you've got copies of the same font in more than one of your five Fonts folders. You might have one version of Comic Sans in your own Home Library Fonts folder, for example, and another in your Mac's main Fonts folder.

Click the one that you want to keep and then choose Edit Resolve Duplicates. Font Book turns off all other copies, and the bullet disappears.

14.7.2.3. Adding, removing, and hiding fonts

Here's what you can do with Font Book:

Install a font . When you double-click a font file's icon in the Finder, Font Book opens and presents the typeface for your inspection pleasure . If you like it, click Install Font. You've just installed it into your account's Fonts folder, so that it appears in the Font menus of all your programs. (If you'd rather install it so that it appears in all account holders' Fonts menus, see Figure 14-10.)

Remove a font . Removing a font from your machine is easy: Highlight it in the Font Book list and then press the Delete key. (You're asked to confirm the decision.) Before taking such a drastic and permanent step, however, keep in mind that you can simply disable (hide) the font instead. Read on.

Disable a font . When you disable a font, you're simply hiding it from your programs. You might want to turn off a font so that you can use a different version of it ( bearing the same name but from a different type company, for example), or to make your Font menus shorter, or to make programs like Microsoft Word start up faster. (You can always turn a disabled font back on if you ever need it again.)

To disable a font, just click it (or its family name; see Figure 14-10) and then click the checkbox button beneath the list (or press Shift-c-D). Confirm your decision by clicking Disable in the confirmation box (turn on "Do not ask me again," if you're the confident sort ).

The font's name now appears gray, and the word Off appears next to it, making it absolutely clear what you've just done. (To turn the font on again, highlight its name and then click the now-empty checkbox button, or press Shift-c-D again.)

Note: When you install, remove, disable, or enable a font using Font Book, you see the changes in the Font menus and panels of your Cocoa programs immediately. You won't see the changes in open Carbon programs, however, until you quit and reopen them.And when you use Font Book to manipulate fonts in Classic, not only must you quit your open Classic programs ”you must actually restart Classic itself to see the changes in your Font menus.

14.7.2.4. Font collections

A collection , like the ones listed in the first Font Book column, is a canned set of fonts. Apple starts you off with collections called things like PDF (a set of standard fonts used in PDF files) and Web (fonts you're safe using on Web pages ”that is, fonts that are very likely to be installed on the Macs or Windows PCs of your Web visitors ).

But you can create collections called, for example, Headline or Sans Serif, organized by font type. Or you can create collections like Brochure or Movie Poster, organized by project. Then you can switch these groups of fonts on or off at will, just as though you'd bought a program like Suitcase.

To create a new collection, click the leftmost + button to create a new entry in the Collections column, whose name you can edit. Then click one of the font storage locations ”User, Computer, or Classic Mac OS ”and drag fonts or font families onto your newly created collection icon. (Recognize this process from playlists in iTunes, or albums in iPhoto?) Each font can be in as many different collections as you want.

To remove a font from the collection, click its name and then press Delete. You're not actually removing the font from your Mac, of course ”only from the collection.

Tip: Each time you create a new font collection, Mac OS X records its name and contents in a little file in your Home folder Library FontCollections folder.By copying these files into the Shared folder (see Section 12.6.2), you can make them available to any one who uses the Mac. If your sister, for example, copies one of these files from there into her own Home folder Library FontCollections folder, she'll see the name of your collection in her own Fonts panel. This way, she can reap the benefits of the effort and care you put into its creation.

14.7.2.5. Font libraries

A font library is a new concept in Tiger. It's another perk for people whose Macs are on a corporate network. A library is a lot like a collection, except that it can include fonts that aren't actually on your machine ”they're on some server elsewhere on the network. Once you've added some fonts to a library, you can even set up collections within that library.

Figure 14-11. The Fonts panel, generally available only in Cocoa programs, offers elaborate controls over text color , shadow, and underline styles. It also contains some of the genetic material of old-style programs like Suitcase and Font Juggler. See the handy font sample shown here above the font lists? To get it, choose Show Preview from the Action popup menu. Or use the mousy way: Place your cursor just above the headings (Collections, Family, and so on) and drag downward.

To create a library, choose File New Library; the library appears in the Collection list at the left side of Font Book. Now you can drag fonts into it, or set up collections inside it by highlighting the library's icon and choosing File New Collection.

14.7.2.6. Exporting fonts

Next time you submit a design project to a print shop or graphics bureau , you won't have to worry that they won't have the right fonts. Tiger makes it easy to collect all the fonts you used in a document and then export them to a folder, ready to submit, along with your document, to the print shop.

Use the Services Font Book Create Collection From Text command (Section 5.9.3.5). Font Book opens and shows you a new collection it's created, containing all the fonts used in your document. Click the collection and then choose File Export Collection. The software prompts you to name and choose a location for the exported fonts folder.

Note: The Create Collection From Text command doesn't work in all programs, but you can always build and export a collection manually.

14.7.3. The Fonts Panel

As noted in Chapter 5, some existing Mac programs have simply been touched up ”Carbonized, in the lingo ”to be Mac OS X “compatible. Choosing fonts in these programs works exactly as it always has on the Mac: You choose a typeface name from the Font menu or a formatting palette.

Figure 14-12. The new Typography palette is a collapsible menagerie of fancy type effects, which vary by font. Each option is a master on/off switch for your entire document. In this example, turning on Common Ligatures creates fused letter pairs like fl and fi; the Mathematical options create true multiplication and division symbols; and the lower-case option affects all text you've already typed.

Things get much more interesting when you use Cocoa programs (Section 5.8), like TextEdit, iPhoto, and Mail. They offer a standard Mac OS X feature called the Fonts panel. If you're seated in front of your Mac OS X machine now, fire up TextEdit or Pages and follow along.

14.7.3.1. Choosing fonts from the Fonts panel

Suppose you've just highlighted a headline in TextEdit, and now you want to choose an appropriate typeface for it.

In TextEdit, you open the Fonts panel (Figure 14-11) by choosing Format Font Show Fonts (c-T). If you've ever used Font Book, this display should look familiar. The first column lists your Collections, as described above. The second column, Family, shows the names of the actual fonts in your system. The third, Typeface, shows the various style variations ”Bold, Italic, Condensed, and so on ”available in that type family. (Oblique and Italic are roughly the same thing; Bold, Black, and Ultra are varying degrees of boldface.)

The last column lists a sampling of point sizes. You can use the size slider, choose from the point-size pop-up menu, or type any number into the box at the top of the Size list.

14.7.3.2. Designing collections and favorites

At the bottom of the Fonts panel is a gear-shaped pop-up menu just like the Action menu in Finder windows. It offers a few useful tools for customizing the standard Fonts panel.

Add to Favorites . To designate a font as one of your favorites, specify a font, style, and size by clicking in the appropriate columns of the Fonts panel. Then use this command.

From now on, whenever you click Favorites in the Collections column, you'll see a list of the typefaces you've specified.

Show Preview . The Fonts panel is great and all that, but you may have noticed that, at least at first, it doesn't actually show you the fonts you're working with ”some-thing of an oversight in a window designed to help you find your fonts. See Figure 14-11 for details. (Choose this command again ”now called Hide Preview ”to get rid of this preview.)

Tip: Once you've opened the Preview pane, feel free to click the different sizes, typeface names, and family names to see the various effects.

Hide Effects . The "toolbar" of the Fonts panel lets you create special text effects ”colors, shadows, and so on ”as shown in Figure 14-11. This command hides that row of pop-up buttons .

Color . Opens the Color Picker (Section 5.11), so that you can specify a color for the highlighted text in your document.

Characters . Opens the Character Palette (Section 9.14.1), so that you can choose a symbol without having to remember the crazy keyboard combo that types it.

Typography . Opens Tiger's Typography palette (see Figure 14-12).

Edit Sizes . The point sizes listed in the Fonts panel are just suggestions. You can actually type in any point size you want. By choosing this command, in fact, you can edit this list so that the sizes you use most often are only a click away.

Manage Fonts . Opens Font Book, described earlier in this chapter.