🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov22.035136.15646@trilithon.mpk.ca.us>  
henry@trilithon.mpk.ca.us (Henry McGilton) writes:
> 
> In 3.0, I notice that the ``system'' seems to look only at the Data
> Fork of Macintosh files.  This is less than useful for Macintosh
> format Type 1 font files, which in almost all cases have their
> useful data in the resource fork of the file.
> 
> Changing directory to the Macintosh floppy and doing ls -1 shows
> the Type 1 font to be of length zero, when in fact there's plenty
> of font data hiding in there somewhere.
> 
> So, one of the major potential uses for 3.0 reading Macintosh floppy
> disks is nullified by this behavior.  I've looked in the 3.0 release
> notes and didn't see anything mentioned about 3.0 and Macintsoh
> floppy disks, except for the watning about writing lots of small
> files.
> 
> Anybody have any great ideas how to deal with these issues in 3.0?
> I hope FloppyWorks is OK on 3.0, because I can't seem to do without
> using FloppyWorks.
> 

There is a way to read it, which I've posted before. You can open() the  
resource fork of a data file 'foo' by opening  'foo.#rsrc#'. Note that this has  
to happen while the Mac filesystem is mounted. Copying via the file viewer to a  
NeXT filesystem loses the resource fork. You can however use cp from the  
command line to copy the resource fork onto a NeXT filesystem.

The Font Installer and Sound Importer of MetroTools take this into account and  
look for the ".#rsrc#" file (resource fork). They also look for resource forks  
in MacBinary files (useful for Mac fonts downloaded straight to a NeXT from an  
online service) and for "flat" resource forks brought over by FloppyWorks.

FloppyWorks runs OK under 3.0, but I understand it is no longer supported by  
DIT (or at least their desire is to phase it out). If you ever install  
FloppyWorks under 3.0 (or a system that is upgraded to 3.0), beware that you  
will have to remove the macintosh.fs from /usr/fileystems before you can  
directly mount a floppy via NeXTSTEP.

As an aside we have recently modified Font Installer to generate ascii-encoded  
Type 1 fonts from binary-encoded ones, and enhanced its conversion  
capabilities. It now successfully converts 98% of all 'unusable' fonts we have  
ever been sent.

We also have our NiteLite screen saver module of MetroTools running while the  
Login Window is up, in house. We will be releasing the upgrade soon.

-- 
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Gordon Van Huizen           vox: 619.488.9411  fax: 619.488.3045
Metrosoft                   gvh@metrosoft.com [NeXTmail welcome]
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