• Improved ascent and descent values are calculated for TrueType fonts.
in addition, FontMonger now “squishes” bitmap characters when necessary (and takes various other actions), so that bitmap fonts come out with ascent/descent as near as possible to the correct values.
Together, these changes give better (i.e. smaller) automatic line spacing in applications like Word, WriteNow, etc.
• A new Family Options dialog is available via “Set Family Options…” on the Keyboard menu. This dialog allows the setting of family-wide ascent and descent values. See the on-line help for details of the dialog.
Note: After changing the line spacing values, you should open each other font in the same family. If, immediately after opening a font, “Save Font” is enabled in the File menu, the font needs to be saved to update its ascent/descent values to match the family-wide values.
• A new checkbox has been added to the dialog that asks you, when constructing a batch of fonts to convert, whether you want to add the fonts from the original family or a copy. The checkbox allows you to specify that the question should not be asked again for the current batch -- whatever response you give to the dialog will be used for the rest of the batch.
Note, however, that if your response is "Copy", you will STILL have to respond to the dialog aksing you to name the folders used to hold the results of copies.
A similar checkbox has been added to the dialog that gives you the option of making a copy of fonts that are in a suitcase file that is locked or in use by another application.
• Numbers are now allowed in the names of families created with the "New Family" button in the "Save Font As" dialog.
• Bold and italic fonts in new families created with the "New Family" button now work correctly when printed with QuarkXPress (although Quark has acknowledged that the problem lies in XPress, not in the fonts).
• FontMonger no longer discards characters with ASCII codes 1-31 and 127. Some non-US fonts require characters to be assigned these values, even though they cannot be accessed through the normal keyboard.
• Some problems handling of symbol characters in fonts other than the "plain" font of a family have been fixed.
• A bug in TrueType hinting that could cause some characters to be displaced or stretched has now been fixed.
• TrueType fonts saved with this version of FontMonger should display and print faster fonts saved in earlier versions, especially when multiple point sizes are mixed in the same document.
• When TrueType fonts are scaled, the default underline position and thickness is scaled too.
• When a font has no specific style name [shows as "(Plain)" in FontMonger], the style name "Regular" is substituted within TrueType font name tables.
• Opening the Apple-supplied version of TrueType Times on a Mac with a 68000 processor no longer causes an “address error” system bomb.
• Very old Casady & Greene fonts, and other Type 3 fonts created with early versions of Fontographer, can now be opened.
• When converting or opening a PostScript font that is formed by horizontally scaling another font (such as Helvetica Narrow, which is based on Helvetica), correct character widths are computed, instead of using the base font widths.
• In a PostScript Type 1 font, composite characters with invalid components no longer cause a CS3 internal error when the font is opened.
• We no longer put out an erroneous copyright notice on fonts converted from Ikarus M type 3 format.
• PostScript comments within font encoding vectors are now ignored when decoding Type 1 and Type 3 fonts.
• FontMonger is now more forgiving of errors in a Type 1 font definition produced by older versions of Fontographer.