Lose Your Mind Development

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.

I’m waiting to get a few things taken care of before the next beta. Here is where we are

Code Signing Certificate – I’ve ordered a certificate from Comodo. But I’m hung up in the company validation stage. Hope to get this resolved on Tuesday.

Check for Updates – I would like to add a “Check for Updates” entry to the Help menu and then return a download link and list of changes.

The HTML version of the changes file (see this page) is already assembled with content pulled from a DBF file. I want Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 to query this file via formal web services. But I’m waiting on our hosting company to install the VPF OLEDB driver so I can hit the DBF.

Bug in the Uninstalled Fonts tab – There is a pesky bug in the treeview control used on the Uninstalled Fonts tab. I’m working with the author of that control to get this resolved.

So I hope to have a new beta released the first week of September. — Bryan

Work on the beta continues at a good pace and I think we are coming close to releasing 8.0 at the end of August or the start of September. There was a short break in work while I was on vacation. But it is time to get the product out the door.

I just finished up a web page that displays the font catalogs and sample sheets that can be printed from Printer’s Apprentice 8.0. Check it out!

Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 Font Catalogs & Sample Sheets

A beta tester sent me a nice email and mentioned an older font program that displayed a category for the font as one of the columns. This is something I have wanted to implement since the early days of Printer’s Apprentice, but simply never did.

I’ve been hip-deep in font related Win32 API calls and I remembered the PitchAndFamily enumeration member of the LogFont class. The PitchAndFamily field classifies a font as decorative,modern (fixed pitch), roman (serif), swiss (sans serif) and script. (There is also “dontcare” which means the font vendor did not add a classification to the font).

Printer’s Apprentice already makes heavy use of the Logfont structure, so it was very easy to expose the classification on screen as a “Family” column. Check out the shot below.

Unfortunately, the PitchAndFamily classification is very rough. And not all vendors use it. I’m looking into exposing the Panose values for a future version.

We continue to test Printer’s Apprentice 8.0. If you want to help out, fill out the sign up form and we will send you the information. — Bryan