FastFontMenu is a System Extension (INIT) which speeds up the building of the Font Menu in most applications. It does this by sorting the font names in an internal array, rather than insertion sorting them in the menu the way the current MacOS does. This improved algorithm is scheduled to be included in a future version of the MacOS, but since that'll take longer to ship, I'm releasing it now as freeware. It's scheduled to expire with version 7.7 of the MacOS. If the fix isn't in the system at that point, I'll release a new version, but I'd really rather have this fixed by the OS than by me. I have no idea what the picture is going to look like for MacOS:The NeXT Generation, but hopefully this sort of kludge won't be needed.
FastFontMenu 1.1 adds caching. This has two benefits. The first is that it'll be MUCH faster for every font menu after the first, as long as your fonts haven't changed (applications that have fonts in their resource forks will clobber the caching, but they've been warned about that by Apple's Developer Support for more than five years). The second benefit is that after the first time, the memory requirements of FFM are much smaller. If you were seeing problems in a control panel or desk accessory, you should no longer see them as long as you've run an application that builds a font menu first. Ideally, this first pass at the menu would be built at startup time, and that's something I'm looking at for 1.1.1.
FastFontMenu is WorldScript savvy, and should give you a font menu that's sorted in the same order that you get without it installed. If you find that this isn't the case, drop me a note, and I'll look into it.
For a small number of fonts, you'll see a relatively small improvement if you notice it at all, but for those people who have a bazillion fonts in their systems, the speed improvement in launching most applications is pretty darned significant. The only case I know of where FastFontMenu can slow things down is on systems which have mostly non-Roman fonts installed. The reason for this is that for non-Roman fonts, FastFontMenu doesn't do the smartest thing possible for the international string comparisons of the font names. This still hasn't been changed as of 1.1, but the caching means you only have to pay the penalty the first time the font menu is built (unless your fonts change).
FastFontMenu 1.0.2 added a 'BApp' resource. It contains the creators of applications that I know cause problems with FastFontMenu (it's an empty list with version 1.1). Feel free to add an application to your copy of FastFontMenu (just put the application's 4-byte creator-code into the resource), but please send me a note about the application so I can see what's up, whether I can fix it, and if nothing else, get it added to my list. Applications in the list do not get the benefit of having FastFontMenu installed, so I'd like to keep the list as small as possible, but it's better to have a slow app than a crashing one.
FastFontMenu is free-ware. FastFontMenu may be distributed and used freely, but not sold for profit. Please only distribute the complete, original archive containing FastFontMenu and this ReadMe file. If you sell FastFontMenu for profit, I'll have to say bad things about you, and we wouldn't want that. Don't even think of contacting me about putting FastFontMenu onto a compilation of shareware and freeware that you're going to sell for a profit. I won't grant you permission. Period. If you are putting FFM onto a software compilation that is included with a magazine, you have permission to do that if you send me the first copy of the magazine and the compilation that accompanies it that include FastFontMenu.
If you feel you simply must send money for this to someone, send a donation to:
The American Civil Liberties Union, 132 W. 43d St., New York, NY 10036
or to:
Amnesty International, 322 8th Ave., New York, NY 10001
Thanks to Matt, Jon, Pete and Ric. Also, thanks to all the people who sent me feedback about version 1.0.2.
Version history:
1.1 - Add caching. If the fonts folder hasn't changed, and the application has no fonts in its resource fork, the same font list as last time will be used. HUGE speedup for most cases, since all I need to do is count the number of fonts available and check the mod-date of the fonts folder. This also means that if you've built the font menu once, the stack and heap requirements of FFM are nearly zero for subsequent invocations. Fix crashing bug caused by reading off the (front) end of the font list. Update icon. Update system version that causes expiration, since it didn't make 7.6.
1.0.2 - Check for applications that (for whatever reason) have problems with FFM. Add new icon.
1.0.1 - In extreme low-memory conditions, call through to the system's version of AppendResMenu. This only affects applications that have less than 6k of free stack when building their font menu (and that much would only be used if you somehow had managed to install sixteen-thousand fonts), but I've gotten a few reports of applications that managed it. Ugh.
