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.

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.

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.

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

I love LEGO bricks. I have a huge closet full of sorted brick bins and sets dating back to the 70’s. So of course this post at The Brothers Brick caught my attention.

Here we have a TrueType dingbat font, titled “LEGO System” made up of LEGO minifigs. I would have preferred a font made of classic Town, Space and Castle figures. And one of the poses is a bit questionable. But this is still interesting and fun.

I believe the same images are used for both upper and lower case.

Download the TrueType LEGO minifig font (“Lego System”) at dafont.com.

Multi-foundry font vendor MyFonts started out 2009 by updating their web site. Looks great.

MyFonts.com also shipped out their latest newsletter with a list of the Top 10 fonts of 2008.

In particular, I’m a fan of the MyFonts.com – Metroscript and Bree faces. Well worth a look.

Printer’s Apprentice 8.0.25 was recently posted to the web site and is available for download.

Download Printer’s Apprentice 8.0.26 for Vista & XP

This version includes many stability fixes. A full list of changes can be found in the versionhistory.txt file on the web site.

Send comments to Bryan at helpdesk at loseyourmind dot com.

I recently received an email about running Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 from a portable drive. I had not considered this during development. But there is nothing in the code that prevents Printer’s Apprentice from running this way.

Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 is based on the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework. So this needs to be installed on any computer that you want to run the application on. This is covered below.

Here are some steps for setting up Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 from a portable drive. I store applications in an “apps” folder on my drive and use this in the examples. But you can place Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 in any folder on your drive.

So lets get started.

1. If you don’t already have Printer’s Apprentice 8.0, download it from the following URL and install it on your PC.

http://www.loseyourmind.com/zipfiles/prnapp80.zip

2. Download a copy of the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Redistributable Package and save it on your portable drive. This is a single 22 MB download name dotnetfx.exe. If you need to run Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 on a machine that does not have .NET 2.0 installed, you will need to run this first. (Note that Vista already has .NET 2.0 installed on it.)

Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Redistributable Package

On my portable drive, I store this in an apps\NET Runtime 2.0 folder. (Click to enlarge.)

3. Then copy the contents of the Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 folder on your PC to your portable drive. Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 is typically found in the following folder.

c:\program files\lose your mind development\printer’s apprentice 8.0

After I have copied PA from my local drive, the portable drive now looks like the screenshot below. (Click to enlarge.) Make sure you copy all the files and folders in the screenshot.

4. You can now run Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 from the portable drive by double clicking the prnapp.exe file.

The only thing that could cause confusion is the configuration file. It is stored on the local hard drive rather than the portable drive. It is usually in the following file.

\documents and settings\{account}\application data\printer’s apprentice\prnapp.exe.config

This is actually not a bad thing. The main thing that the configuration files stores is the location of the font groups folder. And I’m sure that as you move from PC to PC with your drive, the font groups will likely reside on the local drive instead of your portable drive.

If you have any questions, shoot an email to me at helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.