Lose Your Mind Development

Microsoft has been posting some very good developer-oriented material on Windows 7 on its various MSDN sites and blogs. The best source is the Engineering Windows 7 blog.

Most of the Windows 7 material is focused on UI and API changes. But occasionally we get an article related to fonts. Today, the Windows 7 team posted this article about the ClearType technology in Windows 7.

Engineering changes to ClearType in Windows 7

And back in February, there was a post about typography and text rendering in Windows 7.

Advances in typography and text rendering in Windows 7

Here is a non-Microsoft article that looks at the font management UI in Windows 7. It is from the I Started Something blog.

Improvements to fonts in Windows 7

It is great to see that Microsoft is not ignoring font in Windows 7. If you have come across any other Windows 7 font articles, feel free to forward them to helpdesk at lose your mind dot com and I will get the links posted.

The latest build of Printer’s Apprentice has been made available to the beta test team.

The latest changes include

• Fixed a problem with Arial in pstaskdialog.dll. If Arial was missing,   PA would crash when a messagebox was displayed.
• Added a fix for a crash in the print engine. If the print job was deleted from  the spooler before PA was done creating the document, then PA would crash.
• Added a new message box warning about PFM and PFB files not being in the same folder.  This appears after reading a folder and one or more TrueType fonts don’t have matching  PFM & PFB files. This message box can be disabled after the first viewing.

  

• Speed improvements when reading fonts using the Font Files and Font  Groups tab. Information such as the font name, etc is now stored in a  fontcache.xml file. More details about this feature can be found in this blog post.

I’m particularly happy with the speed improvements and PFM / PFB checking. If you want to be part of the beta team, send a request to helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.

Now that Postscript printing is out of the way, I”m working on performance issues for Printer’s Apprentice.

One bottleneck in the system is reading fonts with the Font Files and Font Groups tabs.

When PA displays a list of fonts, it does not just show the file name and size. It also has to show the proper font name. The font names are stored deep inside the TrueType file structure in a series of tables. So when listing the the fonts in a folder, PA opens each file, reads in the file name and other data, then close the file. If you have hundreds of files in a folder, this can take a few (annoying) moments.

To get around this delay, I’m implementing a very simple font cache mechanism. The cache is an XML file, stored in %appdata%\printer’s apprentice\fontcache.xml, with the following structure.

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<NewDataSet>
  <fontcache>
    <path>c:\fonts\ttfonts\a_c\tt0035m_.ttf</path>
    <size>47356</size>
    <fontfamily>Bodoni Bk BT</fontfamily>
    <fullfamilyname>Bodoni Book BT</fullfamilyname>
    <format>1</format>
    <outline>1</outline>
    <bold>0</bold>
    <italic>0</italic>
    <weight>400</weight>
  </fontcache>
</NewDataSet>

I’m still working with the code and .NET calls to see how I can compact the XML. But the basic idea is in place.

When Printer’s Apprentice reads a directory, it first checks the cache for a match on name and file size. If it finds a match, then the font data is right there. Otherwise we need to read the TTF/PFM/OTF data directly. Any new data is saved in the cache as well.

Here are some very preliminary benchmarks for reading in a few folders of TrueType and Postscript fonts. The “initial read” is the first time PA examines a folder of font file. Since it is they are not in the cache, each file is opened up and examined. The “cached read” is the time for subsequent reads of the folder. The files are all found in the cache and don’t need to be opened. The data is right there in the cache.

This is all still in the early stage of development. I’m still working with the storage format and benchmarking. But the work is moving forward. Stay tuned.

Comments? Questions? helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.

Bryan

The changes keep coming. Printer’s Apprentice 8.0.29 was published on our web site today. You can download the trial version or order it directly. Blog readers get a 20% discount.

Download Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for Vista & XP

Purchase Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for Vista & XP – 20% discount

This an important update – I added support for printing Postscript based fonts. So you can now print catalogs and sample sheets for Type 1 and OpenType fonts.

A complete list of changes can be found in the versionhistory.txt file on the web site.

Forward any questions or comments to Bryan – helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.

I’m pleased to announce that the next build of Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 will include support for printing Postscript-based Type 1 and OpenType fonts. This release will be available before the end of March.

Since Printer’s Apprentice is written with Microsoft’s .NET platform, I had to resort to injecting my own Win32 drawing calls in order to render Postscript fonts on the page. Unfortunately, .NET 2.0 does not support PS fonts with GDI+. It took a while for me to get it working, but not as long as I expected.

Here are a pair of screenshots of the print preview window showing font catalogs and keyboard layouts. The catalog shows us printing a mix of Type 1, OpenType and TrueType fonts.

Needless to say, I will be very, very happy to get rid of the “no Postscript” dialog box.

Let me know if you have any questions or want to help with the beta test team.

– Bryan
help desk at lose your mind dot com

This is a neat poster I came across by way of downloadsquad.com. It is the Periodic Table of Typefaces.

This poster displays many familiar fonts that you know and love (or not). Print this up on high quality paper, tack it to the wall and marvel at your uncanny power of instant typeface recognition. Ooo! Look! There is Minion! And Futura! It even contains favorites from the early Mac OS.

Click the image for the full size version.

Periodic Table of Typefaces

Printer’s Apprentice 8.0.28 was published on the web site this morning and is available for download.

Download Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for Vista & XP

This ended up being a fairly sizable release. There are lots of bug fixes in this update and two new features that are worth taking a look at.

First up is the new Font List tab. This is simply a list of all the fonts in the currently selected folder or font group. Earlier versions had a similar feature on the Compare Fonts tab. But you needed to select fonts in order for them to appear in the list. This caused some problems that I elaborated on in an earlier post. (The Compare Fonts function is still there. But it has been renamed Compare Selected Fonts.) Here is a shot of the new Font List tab.

Printer’s Apprentice 8.0.28 now has seven different tabs for showing off your fonts. I figured it would be a good idea to be able to rearrange the tabs as you see fit. (Actually, several users mailed in this idea. So I went ahead and added to the application!) To rearrange the tabs, open the Options dialog. The User Interface tab has a new Tab Order section. Just drag the tab names around until they are in the order you want. Then click the OK button and the UI will rearrange itself.

I hope you enjoy the latest batch of updates to Printer’s Apprentice. As I mentioned above, there are also other minor updates and bug fixes in this release.A complete list of changes can be found in the versionhistory.txt file on the web site.

Forward any questions or comments to Bryan – helpdesk at loseyourmind dot com.

While I do have a copy, I have not yet installed the Windows 7 beta. But I have been closely following the daily reports in the blog world.

And today we have a report about font support in Windows 7 directly from the Engineering Windows 7 blog.

Advances in typography and text rendering in Windows 7

This is a good read. In particular check out the section titled Fonts and Font Management.

The author does make a note of the current Windows graphics system having “not fully embraced OpenType for its mainstream usage of text.” Oh how true this is.

The GDI+ layer, used by .NET, does not support Type 1 or OpenType fonts with Postscript outlines. And that is why I have to start working on some sort of kludge to get Type 1 fonts rendered on the printed page in Printer’s Apprentice 8.0.

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If you have any questions, let me know.

Bryan
helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.