🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Mar12.234628.22333@cs.umn.edu> kanefsky@cs.umn.edu (Steve Kanefsky) writes:
>In article <cZyo5eC00WBLE1o1kH@andrew.cmu.edu> 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
>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.

This still doesn't solve the problem of fonts which don't fall into the
standard Mac bold/italic/outline/shadow/compressed deal.  What about
font families with more than one level of weight?  Helvetica Plain, 
Light, Bold, Super Chunky, Mega-Lite, No-cal, etc.

There should be a standard way to access these as one family, both from
the programmer's point of view, and the user's.  The programmer should 
be able to make a call like AddResMenu(), but tailored for font styles.
Given a font name, something like AddFontStyleMenu(menuHandle, fontName).
along with a more flexible way of using the style that the user selects.
Instead of using hardcoded numbers for different styles, there should
be some way of allowing for the standard styles, plus extras if neccesary.

Ideally, the user would be able to pick a font, and then pick a style from
a popup or an h-menu.  If Super-Extra-Heavy-Bold exists, it should show up
in the menu.

I suppose this involves rethinking fonts yet again, but NFNTs don't seem
to be catching on, and it might help to actually design something that
works better.  (one might say something which works as it should.)

It's hard to address backwards compatibility in cases like this, but the
font situation is getting well-nigh ridiculous.  I'm not suggesting that
I have the answer, but it'd be nice if someone bright at apple could come
up with something a little less frustrating.  Perhaps it'll come out
with the line layout manager?  (which by itself sounds like a great thing
if rumors are true.  Just think!  ff will automagically turn into an
ff ligature, and if you backspace, will turn back into an f!)

-Sho
--
sho@physics.purdue.edu  <<-- extra heavy chunky at times