This user’s guide assumes you are already familiar with your Macintosh computer and its Mac OS operating system. You should already be familiar with fonts and how to use them, but may be unfamiliar with exactly how they work. Or you may be having problems getting your fonts to work properly. If so, you’re not alone; fonts require care and organization and can be damaged easily. And since fonts are used by almost every application you run, the chances of you experiencing font problems is extremely high — even if you’re very careful.
Before explaining how you can use Font Box to ensure the integrity of your fonts, it is necessary to establish a common set of terminology. The following paragraphs explain important font management concepts and terms. Understanding these simple concepts makes using Font Box easier and more meaningful.
Suitcases
A suitcase is a special kind of folder designed to hold system resources such as certain kinds of font files. You can drag items in and out of suitcases just as you do with folders. However, a suitcase only has one level — you cannot store a suitcase within a suitcase as you can with folders. In other words, if you drag a suitcase into another suitcase, the items from the first suitcase are moved into the second. Another difference is that the operating system modifies resources as you move them in or out of suitcases. Versions of Mac OS prior to System 7 required a special program named Font/DA Mover to move resources, but now you can just drag and drop fonts where you want them.
Suitcases can contain two kinds of font resources: TrueType fonts and the bitmapped screen files in Type 1 fonts.
Note that suitcases are not designed to hold Postscript printer fonts. If all this seems confusing, read on; all these terms are explained below.
Bitmapped Fonts
Your computer must be able to display fonts on your monitor as well as to image them on printers. Monitors display fonts as a pattern of dots called bitmaps.
Imagine drawing a large A on a piece of graph paper, then going across every square and writing a 0 if the square is empty or a 1 if the square is full. You’d need to make an on/off decision on squares that are not quite full or not quite empty. After doing this, you would have created the letter A in one specific size — the size you drew on the graph paper. To completely define a bitmapped font, you need to repeat this process for every character in every size you want to create. When your computer displays the character, it reads the 0’s and 1’s and either draws a pixel (a dot on the screen) or leaves it blank.
Obviously, fontographers can’t create bitmapped fonts in every size you need. If you want to use a size for which no bitmapped font exists, your computer performs complicated math to create the size you requested, then displays it on screen. Unfortunately, this scaled font rarely looks the same as the original font. If the font is scaled down to a smaller size, characters lose their shape. If it’s scaled up to a larger size, its diagonals develop a staircase shape known as jaggies.
Other display problems exist with bitmapped fonts. Your monitor has a specific resolution — a fixed number of dots per inch (dpi) — just like the graph paper mentioned above has a specific number of squares per inch. A Macintosh monitor has a standard resolution of 72 dpi. Your printer probably has a resolution of 300 to 600 dpi, and resolutions of typesetters measure in the thousands.
Unfortunately, because bitmapped fonts are available only in specific resolutions, your computer system must perform complicated math to scale characters to the specific sizes and resolutions you need. And when you scale bitmapped fonts up to printer resolutions such as 300 or 600 dpi, the results are usually poor, making bitmapped fonts unacceptable printer fonts despite their usefulness for display monitors.
PostScript Fonts
Adobe Systems solved many of the problems associated with printing bitmapped fonts by taking a different approach in its PostScript font technology. Instead of describing the letter ‘A’ on the graph paper as a pattern of dots, PostScript describes the outline of the letter mathematically as a series of lines and curves. The outline is then filled in to produce the letter ‘A’. Today’s PostScript fonts are in a format known as Type 1. Adobe Type 3 format came first, no one knows what happened to Type 2, so all you have to remember is Type 1 format.
But monitors and printers display high-resolution bitmaps and don’t understand outline fonts. So the processors inside computers and printers must rasterize the mathematical outline of PostScript fonts into a pattern of dots. The advantage of this process over using bitmapped fonts is that the dots are created to match the resolution of the monitor or printer so the characters always maintain their proper shape. The disadvantage of rasterization is that it requires additional processing; hence, PostScript printers have special processors dedicated to rasterizing.
Macintosh computers expect to see suitcase files containing bitmapped font definitions for displaying screen fonts, so PostScript fonts include separate bitmapped suitcase files from the outline font file. Both the suitcase and outline files for a font should be in the same folder to make the font work properly. If you view the font on screen in one of the included bitmapped sizes, the Macintosh happily displays the bitmap. To display screen fonts more reliably, Adobe developed Adobe Type Manager or ATM, which automatically generates bitmapped fonts of almost any size from their PostScript counterparts.
TrueType Fonts
TrueType fonts were co-developed by Apple and Microsoft as an alternative to Adobe PostScript’s market dominance. TrueType fonts use an outline approach, but employ different mathematical descriptions than PostScript. Unlike PostScript, TrueType fonts store bitmapped font descriptions with their outline definitions all in one suitcase file. The ability to generate individual bitmapped screen sizes is built into System 7 and is the TrueType equivalent of ATM.
Why Shouldn’t I Just Open All My Fonts?
To be available for use by the operating system and applications, fonts must be opened. This may tempt you to open all your fonts, but you shouldn’t do so, because opened fonts consume memory and other system resources. In addition, application programs read all open fonts when they start up. So if you open everything, you’ll have a bloated and slow computer and a long, unwieldy font menu.
To properly manage your system resources and to keep your Macintosh running at peak performance, you should open only the fonts you need. There are two basic ways to open fonts:
• By placing them in the Fonts folder
• By using a separate font management utility such as Suitcase, Master Juggler or ATM 4.0 Deluxe
The Fonts folder
The surest way to open fonts is to move them into the Fonts folder in the System folder. This method is simple and doesn’t require an additional program, but its great disadvantage is that you can’t move fonts in and out of the Fonts folder while other applications are running. If you add fonts, they won’t be available until you restart your applications. A few utilities such as Now Startup Manager, Font Manager and Conflict Catcher let you create groups of fonts, called ‘sets’ that you can load or unload by restarting your computer.
Font Managers
Another method of opening fonts is to use a font management utility such as Suitcase, Master Juggler, or ATM 4.0 Deluxe. The utilities can open fonts located anywhere on your hard drive or server, so you don’t need to keep them in the System folder.
The advantage of this approach is that you can open and close fonts without having to restart your system and you can organize your fonts in any folder structure. These utilities can also open defined font sets automatically when you launch certain programs or documents. Note that if you open new fonts, you must still restart most applications to take advantage of them.
The disadvantage with font managers is that you must spend time learning them and configuring your sets. They also require an organized font library so you can quickly find specific fonts — but now that you own Font Box, your fonts will stay organized.
