🚀 go-pugleaf

Ivo Welch asked in a recent post if there was not a way to take seldom
used fonts and organize them at a lower level of the font browser. I figured
out how to do this some time ago, and have been meaning to post it for a 
while now.  This seems a good time both because of Ivo's asking about
it directly and because there are suddenly a bunch more fonts, many
created by Fontographer, available on sonata.  

By the way, as some who read this group may have noticed, one of my 
biggest gripes with the NeXT is the font panel, which I think is a 
complete joke (I was amazed it wasn't updated in 3.0).  The font panel should
really have all of the characteristics of a browser, with multiple levels of
heirarchies, the ability to grab a bunch of fonts and group htem in a 
"folder", etc. (that way you can grab the 5-6 fonts you might want to use
for a document and just have to select from them, instead of scrolling up
and down finding them).  

Anyway, grumbling aside, once I added all of the Type 1 PS TeX fonts
I had something like 300 fonts on my machine, so the panel was completely
cluttered.  A good many of those fonts are the PD ones from Sonata, generally
translated by Fontographer, and they have the disadvantage of all appearing
in the leftmost column of the font panel, making the font panel over-full
at the most basic level.  The trick below allows you to cluster those fonts
in "families", where a given family takes up only one line in the leftmost
column and then has as many lines in the middle column as there are fonts.
What I did was to divide the PD fonts into groups, basically the ones
I chose were 


1)  scripts
2)  blackletters
3)  others

you then go to each font and open up the corresponding .afm file and
on the line that says FamilyName  change the entry to be the  family
name you want to store the font under.  

Thus, for say Alison the top of the .afm file reads

StartFontMetrics 2.0
Comment Generated by Fontographer 10/13/87 2:15:21 PM 
FontName Alison
FullName Alison
FamilyName  Scripts
Weight standard

etc.  and similarly for Author, BrushScript, and all of the other
script fonts made by Fontographer.  Once I'd done all of the PD fonts I
had, breaking them into three entries in the left column instead of 
25-30 the font panel was a good deal less cluttered, but of course it's
still a relatively inadequate aspect of the NeXT (Oh, by the way, you have
to rebuild the afmdir after making these changes).  

I tested this under both 2.1 and 3.0 and have had no troubles.

Hope this is helpful --- Tom


PS:  Ivo also asked if there were any other good alternatives to Courier
for fixed width fonts, and of course there is Ohlfs.  If you are thinking
of getting the Type 1 PS TeX fonts from Y & Y then LucidaSansTypeWriter
is also a pretty good fixed width font (more readable than even Ohlfs
for those with weak vision).