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.