Lose Your Mind Development

Because font listed in the Registry can still go bad….

Most Windows users know about the the Registry. In short, the Registry is where Windows stores configuration information for both hardware and software.

It also stores information about fonts.

When you drag a file into the Windows Fonts folder, Windows adds an entry for the font to the Registry so that the font will be installed the next time you reboot your PC and start Windows. Font information is stored in the following section of the Registry.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts

The entries looks like this:

So how does this relate to a new feature in Printer’s Apprentice?

The Fonts section of the Registry can often get corrupt. Your Registry can get populated with invalid font entries by well-meaning applications or by uninstalling software that does not properly clean up after itself. And when this happens, sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves and manually edit the Registry.

To help with this situation, we are adding a Font Registry editor to Printer’s Apprentice. Ancient versions of Printer’s Apprentice used to have a this feature – it just never made it to the recent 8.x versions.

Here is a screenshot.

Main Features

• Lists the overall status of the Fonts section of the Registry.
• Lists the status of the each font key and value.
• Lists specific reasons why a given font key is considered to be corrupt or invalid.
• Lists specific actions to take for a corrupt key – Delete the key or Repair it.
• Repair function steps you through selecting a font file for the key to point to. If the font is not installed, the Repair function will install it as well.
• Includes an Export to Text File function for saving the contents of the font section.
• Includes a Print function.
• A “Clean All” function will delete all invalid or corrupt entries.

The screen is fairly comprehensive in scope. It is superior to other “Registry Cleaner” tools for the following reasons:

1. The scope is limited to the fonts section of the Registry.
2. The screen shows clear, specific reasons why a particular key is invalid.
3. It offers specific actions to take when a key is invalid.
4. The screen will warn the user if they are removing a key for a font that ships with Windows.

As I mentioned above, the screen is close to being finished. But if you have any suggestions, shoot me a note at helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.

Windows has traditionally run at 96 DPI. But depending on your monitor and resolution you might want to increase the DPI so fonts look larger. Windows 7 has excellent support for a variety of DPI settings.

So everything should look great, right? Everything except Printer’s Apprentice…

A beta tester recently sent me a couple of screenshots of Printer’s Apprentice running at 120 DPI. I run my systems at 96 DPI and had never given a thought to testing the software under different conditions.

What a mistake! You would think software designed for managing fonts would be able to handle DPI changes. I completely overlooked the DPI issue.

After a day of work tweaking the forms, I’m pleased to announce that the next version of Printer’s Apprentice will be “High DPI Aware.” (That is the term Microsoft uses for it.)

If you want to take an early look at Printer’s Apprentice, send an email to helpdesk at lose your mind dot com and I will send you information about the beta program.

Here are some before and after shots of Printer’s Apprentice running at 120 DPI under Windows 7.

Main Screen
You will have to click the image to zoom in to see the full extent of the problems. Notice how the “This font is installed” line runs into the text above it. The controls below the character grid are misaligned. And the blue “Installed Fonts” title bar on the left is too short. All of this is cleaned up in the after shot.

Before:

After:

Options Dialog
The problems are not as evident here. But they are still there. The vertical spacing between the checkboxes is cramped. And text is getting clipped off on the “Warn before uninstalling Windows fonts” checkbox.

Before:

After:

Read Fonts progress dialog
This is, by far, the worst offender. This screen is totally unacceptable under high DPI conditions. There is supposed to be a progress bar and Cancel button below the text. But they are almost completely cut off by the bounds of the form. The line you see at the bottom is actually the top of the progress bar. And you can just see the upper left corner of the Cancel button. Useless.

Before:

After:

We have added a new header bar to each of the font display tabs. This provides room to provide the following pieces of information:

• Font name
• Font file format (TrueType, OpenType or Type 1)
• Font file name and size
• Installation status
• A link button for installing or uninstalling the font

The font name list (down the left side of the screen) also display this information. But the new header bar really makes the information stand out for the currently selected font.

Check out some screen shots below.

Drop us a line at helpdesk at loseyourmind.com if you are interested in being a beta tester.

I’ve always had a particular interest in the fonts that ship with various operating systems. The latest member of the OS club is Roboto, a sans serif typeface for Android 4.0.

Typographica.com just published a review of Roboto and calls it a “four-headed Frankenfont” among other things. Hopefully Android 4.0 fares better in the reviews.

You can also download Roboto from the Typographica review and try it out yourself.

Printer’s Apprentice – Font Manager for Windows 7, Vista & XP
Better support for A4 sized paper… non-US keyboard display and printouts… new warnings when you move or uninstall system fonts… font counts in the folder and font groups view…many small bug fixes and improvements.

Virtual Font Folder – Synchronize your fonts for Windows 7, Vista & XP
Split application into a separate Windows service and controller program… does not need to be running in the System Tray… improved reporting via log files…no longer requires administrator access.

Any other requests or ideas? Contact us at helpdesk@loseyourmind.com.

Printer’s Apprentice 8.1.19, our innovative font manager for Windows 7, Vista & XP, has been released and published on the Lose Your Mind Development web site.

Printer’s Apprentice is always available as a free download directly from our web site. If you like the software, we urge you to purchase a license.

We have a special offer available during the month of June. Use the link below and you can get Printer’s Apprentice 8.1 for $11.99. This is a 50% 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 – 50% discount

• This upgrade includes the following changes:
• NEW: Added Upper/Lower/Mixed Case toggle to Sample Text tab.
• FIX: Fixed up code to ensure default Font Groups folder is created. This was not working in some cases on Windows 7.
• FIX: Font Groups folder now defaults to My Documents rather than Application Data.
• FIX: Added additional intelligence to whether or not the progress dialog is displayed
  when reading files on the Font Files tab. When "Read sub folders" was checked, the progress dialog would always display. It now only displays if there are sub folders or     the total number of fonts in the folder is over the threshold.
• FIX: Added error checking code for "ArgumentOutofRangeException" errors when when reading files in the Font Files tab.

Printer’s Apprentice 8.1.18.1, a font manager 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.

We have a special offer available during the month of March. Use the link below and you can get Printer’s Apprentice 8.1 for $14.99. This is a 40% 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 – 40% discount

This upgrade includes the following changes:

• Installer version 8.1.18.1
• FIX: Updated several pages in the help file. Options section, etc.
• FIX: If the the tabTextSampleText key in the prnapp.exe.config file got corrupted or included too much data, Printer’s Apprentice would crash with an overflow error. This has been fixed.
• FIX: Added status bar help prompts for a few menu items that were missing.
• FIX: In certain cases, OpenType files with hyphenated names would not show up in the Install font list. This has been fixed.

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.

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.