Lose Your Mind Development

A while back I received a feature request from a user. At the time, it seemed pretty easy to implement and I added it to the To Do list.

The user simply wanted a way to increase the font size of the ANSI/Unicode values that are in the upper right hand corner of each cell in the Character Set tab.

Adding the code to change the size was easy enough. The next step was to add the font size selection drop down to the Options dialog. It would look something like this:

I have not really looked at the Options dialog in a long time. But the new option didn’t seem to fit on any of the existing pages. And the more I looked at the Options dialog, the more dated it looked.

So I took the opportunity to redesign the Options dialog. Instead of the tabs, option groups are listed down the left side of the form. This allows me to easily add additional option groups as needed.

I don’t have a release date for the next version – there are still a couple of other things I’m working on. But I welcome any comments or questions you might have. Contact me at helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.

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.

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.