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.

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.

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.

Printer’s Apprentice 8.0.25 was posted to the web site on Tuesday 11/4/08 and is available for download.

Download Printer’s Apprentice 8.0.25 for Vista & XP

This version includes a fix for a nasty little bug that was corrupting the application configuration file.

Fixed a problem with saving the configuration file. Under some circumstances, it could become corrupt and this would lead to all sorts of problems.

When copying/moving a font to a font group, added code to make sure the font groups root folder is valid. A message box gets displayed if the folder is missing or invalid. 

Send comments or suggestions to Bryan at helpdesk at loseyourmind dot com.

Printer’s Apprentice 8.0.24 was posted to the web site on Monday 10/27/08 and is available for download.

Download Printer’s Apprentice 8.0.24 for Vista & XP

This version includes the following fixes and changes:

• Fix for a "divide by zero" error
• Fixed a bug with the Edit>Copy Font List command. If there are no fonts selected in the currently selected tab, the application would crash.
• Compare Fonts tab – fixed a problem that resulted in an IndexOutofBounds error.
• Compare Fonts tab – as you navigate in a font list, the Compare Fonts tab now automatically scrolls so the selected font is at the top of the list.
• Compare Fonts tab – added some code to reduce flicker.
• Compare Fonts tab – fixed a bug that caused the Compare Fonts tab to not draw fonts correctly. This happened under a very specific set of mouse moves.
• Removed a line of code that referred to the Arial font. This could cause a crash if Arial is not installed on the system.
• Added additional error checking for TrueType fonts that have slightly invalid string tables. This would result in the font not being displayed in the Font Files tab.

Send comments or suggestions to Bryan at helpdesk at loseyourmind dot com.

Printer’s Apprentice 8.0.22 adds support for displaying character sets besides the standard 255 glyphs in the standard Latin Windows set (1252). This enables you to easily display and print characters found in non-Western alphabets such as Hebrew, Greek and Cyrillic.

You can download this version from the following link:

Download Printer’s Apprentice 8.0.22 for Vista & XP

In this post, I want to review how non-Western characters are implemented under Windows and the new features in Printer’s Apprentice 8.0.22.

Windows supports the Unicode standard along with several code pages that are included for backward compatibility. Unicode supports over 65,000 characters with defined subsets for different languages and glyphs (Latin, Greek, Arabic, etc). More information about Unicode can be found at unicode.org. Wikipedia also has a good article covering the topic.

The Windows character set approach is an encoding implemented by Microsoft prior to Unicode. Each set contains 255 numbered spots that map to the glyphs in the particular set. A standard set of alphanumeric, symbol and control characters occupy the the first 128 positions. Additionally, Microsoft provides tables, hosted at unicode.org,  that map each character to its associated Unicode value. For example, the Windows Hebrew character set maps the Hebrew letter bet in slot 225 to code point 0×05D1 in Unicode. Printer’s Apprentice uses the Unicode values to draw glyphs on screen and on paper.

With Printer’s Apprentice, I chose to mimic the display of the Windows Character Map (charmap.exe) utility. This app displays glyphs using the full Unicode range, Unicode subsets and Windows Character sets.

This build, 8.0.22, uses the character set approach to group and display glyphs within a font. Eventually I will support full Unicode & Unicode subset displays. By using the Windows character sets, I minimized the changes to the existing code. It also meant that I did not have to design new printed sample sheets for the charts. The existing printed sample sheets work very will with non-Western sets.

One important note – internally, Printer’s Apprentice is a fully Unicode-based application. Strings in Microsoft’s .NET platform are represented as collections of Unicode characters which makes it easy to do the type of things I’m doing under the hood.

And in these example screen shots, I use Cyrillic. But Printer’s Apprentice supports the single byte character sets listed below. (Other sets and Unicode ranges are planned!)

• Western ANSI
• Arabic
• Baltic
• Cyrillic
• Eastern/Central Europe
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Turkish
• Vietnamese

When Printer’s Apprentice starts, it attempts to determine the locale that you are running. For example, if you are running a localized Russian version of Windows, PA will automatically default to displaying the Cyrillic character set.

You will notice the following minor changes in the user interface:

• The Single Character and Character Set tabs display the ANSI and Unicode values in the upper right hand corner. You can toggle their display using the Options screen.
• The current character set in use is displayed in the blue title bar in the upper right hand corner. It is a hotlink that will open the Options screen.

To change the change the character set being used, select Options from the Tools menu or click the set name in the blue title bar. This opens the Options dialog box where you can change the current character set. Also note the new sizes for the Character Set grid.

I also added support for printing the new character sets. So if Cyrillic is currently selected, you can print sheets that look like the sample below. The current character set name has also been added to the pages in the upper right hand corner. If you want to print a different set just click the Options tab on the Print dialog.

As always, we encourage feedback on how features are implemented in Printer’s Apprentice. Feel free to comment in the blog or shoot an email to helpdesk at lose your mind dot com. — Bryan

I received an email this afternoon asking me which fonts are “system fonts” and should not be uninstalled. The timing of this question is good because I’ve been working on how to add a safety net feature to Printer’s Apprentice so users are warned before deleting important fonts such as Arial or Courier.

As far as I know, Windows itself does not maintain an internal list of fonts that are considered “system”. Most menus and dialogs use the fonts specified by the Display Properties dialog box. If a specified font is not available, Windows will fall back on some other OpenType or TrueType font. So how do you determine if a font is vital and should not be deleted?

Microsoft does publish a comprehensive list of which fonts ship with which product. So you can easily determine the fonts that shipped with Vista or BackOffice 4.0.

There is also a list of fonts, originally shipped with various versions of Internet Explorer, that are considered core fonts for the web. This list includes favorites such as Comic Sans MS, Impact and Georgia.

The complete list, by product, plus web core fonts can be found at the URL below.

Microsoft Typography – Fonts & Products

Here is what I recommend – if a font shipped with your version of Windows or is considered a core font for the web, don’t delete it.

The reasoning behind this is simple. Even though you might not use Webdings or Georgia, because the font shipped with Windows, it is likely that you will encounter a file or document that uses it. It might be on the Internet, or from a co-worker or a in a PDF.

The same goes for the Eastern and Arabic language fonts. You might come across an article, via Google, that is in Western language newspaper published in Israel or UAE or Japan. The article itself might be in Western ANSI text, but many of the ads on the site will not be presented correctly because the fonts are not installed.

So don’t delete a font if it shipped with your version of Windows. Disk space is cheap. Instead, send those tacky display fonts with lightening bolt letter strokes to the recycle bin.