Managing Fonts in Classic

Although Classic handles font display and printing automatically, you can set a few options that affect how fonts look. You can set a font-smoothing option in the Appearance control panel, for example. If you use ATM with Classic, you can adjust how it scales PostScript fonts.

Adobe Type Manager (ATM)

You can set several options that affect how the optional Adobe Type Manager (ATM) software scales PostScript fonts for Classic applications. The ATM font smoothing appears onscreen and on printers that don’t use PostScript. In addition, you can set options that affect ATM’s performance. You make these settings in the ATM control panel. The next sections explain all the settings and what they do. Figure 17-13 shows the ATM control panel.

Figure 17-13: Set smoothing and performance options for PostScript fonts in Classic applications by using the ATM control panel.

Note

Adobe Type Manager is required only if you’re using PostScript fonts and want to see them rendered properly on a non-PostScript device (such as your screen or most inkjet printers). If you don’t find ATM in your Classic Control Panels menu, you can find it on the Mac OS 9 installation CD. Note that ATM Version 4.5.2 or higher is required with Classic — other versions crash and keep Classic from starting if installed. The ATM Deluxe control panel also crashes Classic if it hasn’t been updated to Version 4.5.2 or higher. At the time we write this, ATM 4.6.1 is the version included on the Mac OS 9 CD.

Character Cache Size option

The Character Cache Size option affects performance. If applications seem to scroll more slowly with ATM turned on, try increasing this size.

Preserve option

The Preserve option determines whether ATM preserves line spacing or character shapes when it scales text. Preserving line spacing keeps line breaks and page breaks from changing with and without ATM, but this setting may clip the bottoms of some letters and vertically compress some accented capital letters. Preserving character shapes reduces the clipping but may change line breaks. The clipping occurs only onscreen and on output devices that don’t use PostScript. No clipping occurs on a PostScript printer.

Smooth Font Edges on Screen option

The Smooth Font Edges on Screen option smoothes font edges onscreen in the same way the Appearance control panel does — by blending their jagged edges with the background color. Whereas Appearance works with all TrueType fonts, ATM works on Type 1 PostScript fonts. ATM can implement anti-aliasing of color text only when the monitor is set to display thousands or millions of colors. If the monitor is set to display 256 colors, ATM can implement anti-aliasing on black-and-white text only.

Precision Character Positioning option

The Precision Character Positioning option displays more accurate spacing, especially at small font sizes. Turning on this option causes ATM to calculate character positions on a fractional pixel basis, which may slow text display of some documents on slower computers.

Enable Font Substitution

By checking the Enable Font Substitution you are allowing ATM to substitute a standard font when a specified font is unavailable. This feature will prevent jagged fonts from being displayed or printed, but will change the look of your document.

Font Activation in Classic

The simplest way to activate fonts in Classic is to place a copy of the font in the Fonts folder of the active Classic System Folder. However, if you are a designer, or deal with many fonts on a daily basis, it becomes very tedious to activate and deactivate fonts manually in this manner. Mac OS 10.3 is the first Macintosh OS that ships with an Apple-supplied application that provides some font management tools. Font Book enables you to activate and deactivate fonts on the fly, and makes the active fonts available to Classic. However, third-party font utilities, which have been around for a while, allow you to organize and activate fonts with more automated controls (see Chapter 12 for more information on Font Book and some of the third party font utilities). Here are a few options:

• ATM Deluxe is a Classic-only application that extends the features of ATM, and activates fonts dynamically when you open a Classic document that contains fonts your system doesn’t have. Other ATM Deluxe features facilitate reviewing, organizing, adding, and removing large numbers of Classic fonts as well as diagnosing some font problems. Fonts that are activated by ATM Deluxe are only seen by Classic applications. Look to www.adobe.com for more information on ATM Deluxe

• Both Extensis Suitcase and Extensis FontReserve are Mac OS X–native applications (they are Carbon, so they run in Mac OS 9 as well) that have similar functionality to ATM Deluxe. They allow you to manage your fonts and even auto-activate them in some applications (auto-activation features usually require a plug-in for some applications such as Illustrator or Quark Xpress. Plug-ins are provided by the Font utility Manufacturer). A great feature of both of these applications is that they make your fonts available in both Mac OS X and Classic. Professionals in a group environment benefit from FontReserve’s server package, which allows groups to share the same font sets. Extensis’s Web site, www.extensis.com, has trial downloads and more information on these products.

• Alsoft’s Master Juggler has been updated for Mac OS X, and can activate fonts in the Classic application environment. You can find more information about Master Juggler at www.alsoft.com.

Cross Reference

See Chapter 12 for additional coverage of font management in the Classic environment.