Lose Your Mind Development

Printer’s Apprentice 8.1.0005 for Windows 7, Vista & XP has been released and published on the Lose Your Mind Development web site.

Printer’s Apprentice is always available for you to try directly from our web site. And if you like the software, we hope that you will purchase a license. Use the link below and you can get Printer’s Apprentice 8.1 for $20. This is a 20% discount off the regular price

Download Printer’s Apprentice 8.1 for Windows 7, Vista & XP

Purchase Printer’s Apprentice 8.1 for Windows 7, Vista & XP – 20% discount

This is a major upgrade and includes the following changes:

• Printer’s Apprentice 8.1 works great with Windows 7. There are many cosmetic enhancements in the application for better integration with both Windows 7 and Vista.
• Printer’s Apprentice now queries the system to determine the correct font used for drawing dialog boxes. This font is then used to render the various screens in Printer’s Apprentice. In most cases this is Segoe UI.
• New Menus & Colors tab on the Options dialog. On this screen you can change menu, toolbar & icon styles. You can also change the color of the accent bars used across the top of the main screen.
• Font Files and Font Groups tabs use a new tree control. This should eliminate the "object not set" errors that could pop up with the old control.
  The old control, exptreelib.dll & .pdb, will be replaced with the new logicnp.folderview.dll when you run the Printer’s Apprentice setup program.
• Added a "Make New Folder" button to the Copy / Move Font to Folder dialog box.
• Added a "Make New Group" button to the Copy / Move Font to Font Group dialog box.
• Fixed a bug with installing Type 1 fonts. If the registry key SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Type 1 Installer\Type 1 Fonts did not exist, then the install would fail.
• When installing multiple fonts, and one or more of them is already installed, a dialog box would popup showing you the number to be installed and the number already installed. This now uses a message box with Yes/No buttons instead of just OK.
• Fixed a bug in the OpenType font reading routines. Some fonts were being ignored if they had invalid strings in the OTF NAME table.
• When no font is selected, the Character Set and Keyboard tabs no longer display a font. This is more consistent with the behavior of other tabs.
• Fonts that are in use, locked by Windows or protected by file permissions often cannot be uninstalled. Additional text has been added to the "0 Fonts were uninstalled" message box explaining why fonts can’t be uninstalled.

A complete list of changes can be found in the Printer’s Apprentice Version History page.

Any comments or questions? You can send them directly to the developer behind the software via helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.

José Pacheco posted a review of Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 on his Designi1 blog. His web site also includes articles, free resource links, tips & tutorials. Be sure to check it out.

Designi1.com

Printer’s Apprentice review at Designi1.com

Thanks for the review, José!

Here is a look at upcoming features for Printer’s Apprentice 8.1.  This version has lots of fixes for improved support with Windows 7. All screenshots below were taken using the release version of Windows 7 Home Professional.

Printer’s Apprentice 8.1 is slated for a mid-December 2009 release. If you are interested in participating in our beta program, please send an email to helpdesk@loseyourmind.com.

• Printer’s Apprentice 8.1 works great with Windows 7. There are many minor cosmetic enhancements in the application for better integration with both Windows 7 and Vista. For example, the toolbar will use Windows 7 icons and listboxes support hover highlight effects.
• Printer’s Apprentice now queries the system to determine the correct font used for drawing dialog boxes. This font is then used to render the various screens in Printer’s Apprentice. In most cases this is Segoe UI.

  

• New Menus & Colors tab on the Options dialog. On this screen you can change menu, toolbar & icon styles.  You can also change the color of the accent bars used across the top of  the main screen.

  

• Font Files and Font Groups tabs use a new tree control. This should eliminate the "object not set" errors that could pop up with the old control.  The new control is FolderView.Net, provided by LogicNP Software.

  

• The old control, exptreelib.dll & exptreelib.pdb, will be replaced with the new  logicnp.folderview.dll when you run the Printer’s Apprentice setup program.
• Added a "Make New Folder" button to the Copy / Move Font to Folder dialog box.
• Added a "Make New Group" button to the Copy / Move Font to Font Group dialog box.
• Fixed a bug with installing Type 1 fonts. If the registry key 
  SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Type 1 Installer\Type 1 Fonts did not exist, then the install would fail.
• Fixed a bug in the OpenType font reading routines. Some fonts were being ignored if they had invalid strings in the OTF NAME table.
• When installing multiple fonts, and one or more of them is already installed, a dialog box would popup showing you the number to be installed and the number already installed. This now uses a message box with Yes/No buttons instead of just OK.

Printer’s Apprentice 8.00.34 for Windows XP, Vista & 7 has been released and published on the Lose Your Mind Development web site.

Printer’s Apprentice is always available for you to try directly from our web site. And if you like the software, we hope that you will purchase a license. Use the link below and you can get Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for $20. This is a 20% discount off the regular price

Download Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for Vista & XP

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

This is a minor upgrade and includes the following changes:

• Updated web links to various pages at loseyourmind.com
• Improved startup splash screen.
• Various minor bug fixes.

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

Any comments or questions? You can send them directly to the developer behind the software via helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.

On Wednesday, August 5 we are offering Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for the discounted price of $11.95. This saves you 53% off the regular price. This deal is available for one day only.

To take advantage of the discount, visit the link below on Wednesday, August 5, 2009.

Get Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for $11.95 One Day Only Wednesday, August 5, 2009 http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/printers-apprentice-80/

We are doing this through our partners at Bits Du Jour. Visit them everyday for discounted deals on great software.

I’m proud to announce that Printer’s Apprentice 8.00.32 for Windows Vista & XP has been released and published on the Lose Your Mind Development web site. Our popular font manager continues to grow and improve with each new version.

Printer’s Apprentice is always available for you to try directly from our web site. And if you like the software, we hope that you will purchase a license! Use the link below and you can get Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for $20. This is a 20% discount off the regular price

Download Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for Vista & XP

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

Here is a closer look at a few of the new features.

Speed! – Printer’s Apprentice now caches the information read from uninstalled TrueType, OpenType and Type 1 fonts. The data is stored in an xml file to make subsequent reads of the same fonts much faster. A past blog post examines the data storage structure and includes a performance table showing initial read versus subsequent reads.

Missing PFM / PFB Detection – One of the most frequent questions emailed to us is “Why can’t I view Type 1 fonts out of the Adobe Type Manager folder?” By default, ATM stores PFM and PFB files in separate folders. To view uninstalled Type 1 fonts, Printer’s Apprentice needs the PFM and PFB files in the same folder. Version 8.00.32 now displays this message box if missing files are detected in a folder.

Full Screen Toggle – Need to see more fonts? Use the full screen toggle button!

Sorting Arrows in Font Lists – Like Windows Explorer, Printer’s Apprentice now uses the built in sorting arrows in all the font lists throughout the application.

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

Any comments or questions? You can send them directly to the developer behind the software via helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.

The next version of Printer’s Apprentice is being prepped for the beta team. Download notices should go out in the next day or so.

The next  update will have a pair of “fit & polish” features. These are nothing too serious. And they certainly did not take long to implement. But they simply make the application better.

Full Screen Toggle – This button simply maximizes Printer’s Apprentice to fill the full screen. The top title bar is hidden and the Printer’s Apprentice window covers the Windows Taskbar. The hotkey to toggle full screen mode is F11. (Microsoft Office and FireFox also use F11 for full screen modes.)

This feature is great for when you really want to see your fonts blown up large. Or for when you are working with a client on font selection over a shared monitor.

Sorting Glyphs (Arrows) – Like Windows Explorer, Printer’s Apprentice now uses the built in sorting arrows in all the listviews throughout the application.

This should have been in the application a long time ago. However, the .NET listview control does not expose the arrow functionality directly. So the implementation uses Windows API calls. The code was not difficult at all. But it kept getting bumped down on the To Do list.

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.