Lose Your Mind Development

Printer’s Apprentice 8.00.34 for Windows XP, Vista & 7 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 8.0 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

This is a minor upgrade and includes the following changes:

• Updated web links to various pages at loseyourmind.com
• Improved startup splash screen.
• Various minor bug fixes.

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.

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.

I’ve got two new user interface enhancements coming up that I think users will be very pleased with.

First up, lets take a look at the order of the tabs in the main font window. Going all the way back to Printer’s Apprentice 1.0, the first tab has always been the single character tab. Why? That is just how I did it back then. And new tabs have been tacked on giving us Printer’s Apprentice as we know it today. The default tab order is Single Character, Character Set, Sample Text, Keyboard, Font Information and Compare Fonts.

Of course, the tab order that I have selected may not be suited for everybody else. So I have added tab order selection to the User Interface section of the Options tab. All you do is drag the entries in the Tab Order listbox to reorder as you see fit.

After we move our tabs around and click OK, the main Printer’s Apprentice window looks like the screenshot below.

This feature has been requested by many users and I think it will be well received.

In the screenshot above, we made the Compare Fonts tab come first. This leads us into the next UI enhancement.

If you are familiar with the Compare Fonts tab, you know that you have to use the checkboxes to select which fonts appear. This is a glaring problem in the software and leads to problems. For example, if you are looking at a folder of fonts and want to compare them all, you can do a Ctrl-A and add them to the Compare Fonts tab. Now you want to print or install just five of them. You can’t do that because the all the fonts are selected for use in the Compare Fonts tab. Not good.

Well we have changed that. When browsing Install Fonts, folder and groups, all the fonts will automatically be added to the Compare Fonts tab. There is no longer the need to need to select one or more fonts using the checkbox.

These two enhancements will be in the next version of Printer’s Apprentice. If you have any comments or you are interested in being a beta tester, drop a note to helpdesk at loseyourmind.com.

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.

Things have been quiet on the blog for a while. But that does not mean we are not working on Printer’s Apprentice!

Behind the scenes, I’ve been continuing work on Printer’s Apprentice. Most of the work is on stability improvements for the software. A few users have come up with scenarios that crash the software. So I’m working on those issues.

I hope to have a new release out before the end of December. If you have encountered any crashes or you have suggestions for improvement, please shoot me an email at helpdesk at lose your mind dot com. — Bryan

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.

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.

On Friday, September 12, 2008, Lose Your Mind Development released Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 on our web site.

Printer’s Apprentice is our powerful font manager for both Windows Vista & XP.
With Printer’s Apprentice, you can browse and print samples of the TrueType, Type 1 and OpenType fonts on your PC, view uninstalled fonts, print font catalogs in multiple formats and effortlessly install/uninstall groups of fonts with a few clicks. Printer’s Apprentice has many other features that makes Windows font management fun and easy.

Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 is for Vista & XP only. New features include redesigned user interface, better looking printouts, full print preview functionality and superior compatibility with Vista. Our software is digitally signed.

For more information, please see the following pages:

Lose Your Mind Development home page
Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 product information
Screen shot Gallery
Font Catalog & Sample Sheet Gallery

If you have purchased a previous version of Printer’s Apprentice, see our Upgrade Information page.