C. A. Cheney's dashboard

FontBook will check for bad fonts, see here http://www.apple.com/pro/tips/badfont...

Pieter,
Also I checked to see if some of these files were 0 k as experienced by egellington. None was 0 k. Most were Windows ttf files, a couple were labelled as "suitcase" files. One is labelled as "datafork" file. But all display glyphs correctly, just not Preview.

Pieter,
I downloaded and installed the new version with the Contextual Menu choice to Create New Preview, but it made no difference. I tried it on Wingdings (original and W2 & W3), .Keyboard-Regular (dot is part of name), Webdings, & Symbol-Regular, all fonts that display previews in Lucida Grande but show correct glyphs in bottom glyph pane.

I am looking to see if there are non-dingbat fonts that have this problem.

Pieter,

I have other fonts that seem to install fine but display in Lucida Grande, if you want to see some others.

C.A. Cheney – C. A. Cheney, on July 31, 2009 00:37

kmartin,

What green bar? where do you see that when you activate a font?

I see a red highlight bar whenever a font is selected; then I can click the box to activate a font but the red bar does not change.

Fast response, wow! way to go, Pieter.

Pieter,

I think I understand. In experimenting I find that with pi fonts that display in Lucida in the Preview column, I can find the pi glyphs if I choose not "Private Use" in the category pull-down menu, but "All". So I can work with that.

But with regard to fonts being displayed in grey in the glyph/waterfall/body text areas, ALL of my fonts display in grey---system fonts, activated fonts, inactivated fonts. Why is that? They are all black in the Preview column.

--C.A. Cheney – C. A. Cheney, on April 01, 2009 17:13

Pieter,

Yes, I do understand. I appreciate your response and that you will tuck the idea away in that "Someday" file.

Thanks.

Pieter,
Yes, this could definitely work, but not exactly fulfil what I had in mind.

The reason I raised the question had to do with how long one's list of tags can become, to the point of not being able to view them all without a lot of scrolling. One of the basics of using tags is consistency: not categorizing something as "black" one time and "bold" another. The longer the tag list, the more tags are out of sight, and the more scrolling to remind yourself "what am I calling this sort of thing?" You want to use the same word you used before.

The provision for notes in Fontcase is really good, but can't be used for "keywords" because there is no visible list to enforce consistency. Let's say I have a number of pi fonts, lots of them, and I want to mark all of them for what sort of unique or special glyphs they offer. I start in with putting the information in the Notes, as follows: leaf, book, cat, microwave tower, faces, tree, nature, farm animals, animals, cow, sheaf of wheat, foliage, nature, electronics symbols, lion, patterns, circular symbols, trademarks, logos, tiger, african animals, dog, elephant, sword, heraldic, etc. (Bear in mind that some pretty useful pi glyphs occur in typefaces that are not confined to a single subject matter.)

So now I have all these words used in the Notes section of many different fonts. When I go to add notes to more pi fonts, here is no way for me to look at a list and easily see, do I have a category called "Farm animals"? One for "Bull"? And when I go to search, I have to **remember** what the search terms might be. Did I put all the cows under "Farm animals" or not? Do I even have such a category?

So, the Notes (while good for really specific stuff you will remember like "used on the Maytag Washing machine ad campaign") are not useful for categorizing, and if you use tags as liberally as I have done here with my listing of descriptors for fonts with specific "pictures", you'll have a list of tags so long it will take forever to scroll and look at. But, if you have hierarchical tags, you can have a root tag called, say, "Nature" and within that "folder" maybe a subfolder for animals and one for plants; 'animals" can contain "farm animals", "children's drawings", "cattle", "rooster", "barnyard fowl", etc etc. If you are looking for pictures of oak trees, the "Animals" tag root folder is closed and takes up little room.

Fonts are so subjective, in a way. Yes, there are the agreed-upon classifications derived from history and design, but if a person works with fonts a lot they may have many other cross-references that they wish to make to easily find things. I have a group of fonts with unusual ampersands, and others that I call "narrow," "stylish", "rounded", "sharp" and on and on.

What do you think? – C. A. Cheney, on March 09, 2009 00:55

Yes, you are right about PopChar. I remembered it wrong.

One case that would call for such a search function would be:

Suppose you are choosing a headline or display font and you will be using an ampersand or a euro in the text. One of the criteria for deciding on your font, is how this character looks. Ampersands and Euros vary a lot. So if this suggested search were possible, you could select 10 fonts and see a display of the particular character in every font, in the same window.

In Fontcase at present I can do this by making a new "Sample" that consists of the desired characters, and then the main pane shows those characters as the Preview for all the fonts being viewed.

But suppose I do not know how to type the character I want; as an ignorant American, I do not type a "Euro" often enough to remember the key combination. In order to enter a Euro (or whatever) into the Sample creator, I have to use another program like PopChar to find out the keyboard combination for the euro, or maybe I can use PopChar to paste the character in to the Sample Creation box. Either way, not very handy.

Or, suppose I want to see which fonts have a certain rare character: an "eth" or a "thorn" from Old English, for example.

The more I think about this the more complicated it seems it would be to implement it. Some characters or symbols are found in multiple forms in a single font, e.g. arrows in pi or dingbat fonts. A given font may have 15 arrows. Character names would vary by language. A few (like Ampersand or Euro) are standard across many languages , but not many. So finding them would be hard.

But then I wonder, how do designers get this functionality now? Surely it is something that would come up a lot. In the case of something like the Euro, you might even want to use a Euro from a font different from the font used as your body text.

I didn't state my question exactly right, here is a clarification:

The Search box seems to look for the search term in any part of the data. Let's say I have 10 pi fonts with the word "nature" in the "notes" and I want to find them. But I also have 20 miscellaneous fonts from the company "Signature". Searching for "nature" finds these 20 as well as the other 10.

At present it seems like the only way to do a precise search on one selected criterion, by Notes, or by Foundry, etc., is to set up a Smart Folder. That's not necessarily something that needs to be changed, but at least it should be spelled out in the help. I searched the Help for "find" and "search" with no result.

I read the help more carefully and see that I can do what I wanted to do, with the slider at the lower right, in the outline view.

Question answered

I am sorry, back to the app to see how I missed this.

It's a feature of PopChar, and I thought Fontcase might also do this. PopChar can search for "euro", "pilcrow" (the symbol for paragraph), "spade" (as in suit of cards symbol), and so on. Thanks for looking into it.