Allright, let's face it, version 0.ß54 is far from a complete application, but
I wanted to get an idea how much interest there was in a application like this.
That aside, let's discuss what this can (or should) do.
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ProCreation is for adding, deleting, changing and renaming the links between Fonts and their appropriate PostScript Printer files. It allows you to view these links in the left side of the window. If you frequently design fonts or edit fonts in programs like Fontographer you may want to create a whole family of bitmaps that change like the standard Helvetica and Times families (i.e. when you change Times to italic in the style menu, the system knows to use Times-Italic when printing, as opposed to just making Times-Roman slanted.) You can create the distinct fonts in Fontographer but it doesn't allow you to combine them into a interconnected family. ProCreation will allow you to rename or select another font to link to the style variations or a particular font.
(*** Note: this is a beta version and due to some nasty problems with ****)
(*** the Font renaming routines (trashing kerning tables) I have disabled**)
(*** the actual linking buttons within the program, I hope to have this****)
(*** ready soon, (it is pretty useless without it.) It is still useful for ****)
(*** looking at the fonts and their printer names. ********************)
ProCreation is designed to mimic the Apple's Font/DA mover. It doesn't completely match, but it should be close enough to learn quickly.
'Open…', to select the fonts to work with, select 'Open…' and choose a Font/DA Suitcase to work with. I haven't decided how to work with multiple suitcases yet, so you may want to combine all of the fonts to work with in one suitcase.
'Close', simply closes the currently open font file. It will also close out the currently selected font. (i.e. it will close whatever you are working on)
'Edit', this loads the font for editing. It will display the Family name, style variation (if there is one) and Printer font name. In the sample box it will display the currently selected font size (default is the smallest.)
'Link', this allows you to link the selected font to the currently loaded font style variation.
'Help', pretty explanatory, nuff said.
'Quit', another easy one, if you don't know you're using an IBM to often.
'Font Class', this one is pretty tricky. If you know anything about the internals of fonts you understand what a font's class means, but if not perhaps a description is in order. The font class represents the way the printer, (and programs like ATM) handle printing. It takes settings for whether to generate bold, italic, and other style variations by modifing the font or substituting another font (instead of using Times-Italic, it could take Times-Roman and give it a skew of 40°.) The reason it is important is the way it relates to new font variations. If you rename the italic style of your font, you must also change the font class to turn off the automatic italic skewing of your font. I hope to have all of this automatic in future versions, but there may be reasons to change it even then (I can't think of any, but Mac programmers account for every possibility)
Font Size List, by selecting appropriate sizes you can change which font sample you see. (with ATM it still only displays the installed sizes)
Well, that's about it. Hopefully it can be useful to somebody out there. I have disabled a few things in this beta version because they aren't working right yet, but I hope to have those ironed out soon. If you like this program let me know and I see to it you get the final version and future upgrades (I don't plan on charging anything for this, if you want it you can have it.) If you have an interest in the code for this project give me a holler and maybe we can trade code.
"I like it, I like it, where the heck are you????"
