Joined: Dec 23, 2005 Posts: 9 Location: Gothenbourg, Sweden
Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 9:36 am Post subject: Some questions about fonts
Hi
I have some questions about fonts that should be of general interest.
(I started to wonder about this when the equals sign in the Neo math editor
turned into a floppy disc symbol )
First I tried to figure out the places where fonts are located and the order
they are searched. This is what I came up with:
- The application's own Fonts folder.
In the case of NeoOffice on my Mac it's
/Applications/Mac/Editorer/NeoOffice.app/Contents/share/fonts/
and there are the fonts:
neos___.ttf, opens___.ttf and 10 versions of Bitstream Vera.
and finally
"Classic" /System Folder/Fonts/
Don't know how Classic fit in here really i.e. in what order it's being search.
Next I trid to find out which fonts that *has* to be there:
Minimum requirements in /System/Library/Fonts/ seems to be:
Keyboard.dfont
LastResort.dfont
LucindaGrande.dfont
Monaco.dfont
Helvetica.dfont
Nothing *has* to be in the others but usually they are full of different fonts,
in my case I had some 140 font families. The problem with this becomes obvious
when you open the font list in Neo that not only lists font families but all
versions of every font too.
===================
Now to my questions
- Is this search order above correct especially with aspect to Neo i.e. does
Neo start with it's own library and neglects every font with the same name
in the others?
- What is the minimum font requirement for Neo?
How (or can I) get rid of Bitstream Vera? And is it wise to do that?
What happens at the next update?
- What is a recommended set of fonts i.e. which fonts should be there to make my
computer life smooth, both with respect to Neo but also considering everything
else that we do with our computers? Of course I want to be able to read
documents that are sent to me and webpages without the font
always being Helvetica.
- I made sure that Lucida is nowhere in this hierarchy of fonts above but still,
it's in my Neo-fontlist with 10 versions.
The LucidaGrande in my /System/lib/fonts only come in Regular and bold.
How do I get rid of Lucida and where is it located?
(Yes I have rebooted)
- Why not groping of font families in the font menu in Neo? A heritage from OOo?
If so, why don't they group?
- Why not different sets of fonts for reading and writing?
You want to have a big font library for reading others material but very often
you only use a small number of fonts when you write so that would be natural.
This could be solved locally within Neo if I had the possibility to decide
which fonts that should be present in the fontlist.
Erland
"In a world without fences, who needs Gates?"
"In a world without darkness, who needs Sun?"
"In a world without temptation, who needs Apples?"
Sorry, but most of your questions don't make any sense to me as I think that you are making some very incorrect assumptions about how fonts are managed by Mac OS X. So, I'll try to explain how fonts are handled by Mac OS X and maybe that will help:
Most importantly, you do all font management on Mac OS X using the /Applications/Font Book application. You can add, remove, enable, and disable fonts there. Messing with font folders is the Mac Classic way of managing fonts and is not reliably supported by Mac OS X 10.3 or higher.
Fonts are loaded by Mac OS X when you boot your machine. It is true that Mac OS X loads fonts in the standard system folders, but it also loads any fonts that you have added using the /Applications/Font Book application. When NeoOffice launches, we ask Mac OS X to also load our bundled Bitstream and OpenSymbol fonts if they aren't already loaded as we need them.
After that, we merely query Mac OS X for the list of fonts available. The order of the list is not controlled by our code; it is controlled by Mac OS X and the ordering algorigthm is not documented by Apple. The only thing that we do handle the case where there are two or more fonts with the same name (i.e. duplicate fonts). In such cases, we take the font that is first in the list that Mac OS X returns and ignore any duplicates thereafter.
If you are trying to trim the font list in NeoOffice, there is only one way to do that: disable (but don't delete) the fonts that you don't want to appear using the /Applications/Font Book application and relaunch NeoOffice. Note, however, that this will make the disabled fonts not appear in the font dialog in all applications, not just NeoOffice.
Joined: Dec 23, 2005 Posts: 9 Location: Gothenbourg, Sweden
Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 3:22 pm Post subject:
Hi Patrick, nice talking to you again
Yes thanks, your explanation solves some of my question. If I have a version of
say Bitstream Vera then it is used, otherwise you ask OSX to load your version.
That's the order I want.
And it's not wise to take Bitstream Vera away. But I already guessed that
So I know I am supposed to use Font Book but it doesn't do the job for several reasons.
- There are no signs of Bitstream Vera in Font book. Now this is probably quite
good because if Neo need that font you don't want me to take it away.
But does Neo also load Lucida? There is no sign of that font in Font Book either
and it's not in any of my font librarys. I have it on my computer together with
hundreds of other fonts in a place where I hope no one will find it. If the
system found it, it would have found all the other fonts to.
So who is loading Lucida and from where?
- And since Neo asks OSX to load Bitstream Vera I get BitstreamV when I open
Word to and i don't think Word needs it. So my font lists are cluttered with
fonts that I don't really want and I can't control this from Font Book.
But for some reason Lucida is not in the font list of Word, why is that if it's
in Neos font list?
- Some applications seems to do what ever they want here. When I load for
instance OOo I get lots and lots of fonts that I don't have in any of my font librarys.
So there are several reasons for me to, at least, try to understand how things
really work with fonts.
It's always easier to accept strange things if you understand why they happen.
But if we disregard how to manage fonts for now and look at my other questions.
Assuming I control this from Font Book, what is a recommended minimal set of enabled fonts?
And why not font families i.e one line with Bitstream Vera in the font list and
then you control italic and bold and so on in some other place. There is
probably a reason for this or?
- There are no signs of Bitstream Vera in Font book. Now this is probably quite
good because if Neo need that font you don't want me to take it away.
But does Neo also load Lucida? There is no sign of that font in Font Book either
and it's not in any of my font librarys. I have it on my computer together with
hundreds of other fonts in a place where I hope no one will find it. If the
system found it, it would have found all the other fonts to.
So who is loading Lucida and from where?
NeoOffice doesn't load Lucida; Apple's Java loads this font. The loading appears to happen as soon as we ask Java to show a window or add a mneu to the menubar.
erland wrote:
- And since Neo asks OSX to load Bitstream Vera I get BitstreamV when I open
Word to and i don't think Word needs it. So my font lists are cluttered with
fonts that I don't really want and I can't control this from Font Book.
But for some reason Lucida is not in the font list of Word, why is that if it's
in Neos font list?
Since Apple's Java code is not public, I cannot tell you what special steps Apple's Java code does to limit use of Lucida to only to applications that use Java.
erland wrote:
- Some applications seems to do what ever they want here. When I load for
instance OOo I get lots and lots of fonts that I don't have in any of my font librarys.
There is no mystery to this process. X11 does not display native Mac OS X fonts so the the OOo X11 volunteers decided to "fake it" by making duplicate copies of all of your fonts. While X11 can display the duplicate fonts that OOo creates, this has the nasty side effect of doubling the number of fonts that all native Mac OS X applications see.
erland wrote:
But if we disregard how to manage fonts for now and look at my other questions.
Assuming I control this from Font Book, what is a recommended minimal set of enabled fonts?
And why not font families i.e one line with Bitstream Vera in the font list and
then you control italic and bold and so on in some other place. There is
probably a reason for this or?
There is no recommended minimal set of fonts as fonts don't use any system resources if they are never used. Only when you use a font does Mac OS X load the whole font file into memory.
As for how NeoOffice lists fonts, that is a limitation of the OOo design. Their font drop down is programmed to display a raw list of fonts and it does not have any support for making a more menu-like structure. To do that, we would need to tear apart and rewrite the OOo code. While we may have the engineering time and resources to do so someday, for the near future our scope will remain limited to our exsting scope: making OpenOffice.org's existing code run natively on Mac OS X.
Joined: Dec 23, 2005 Posts: 9 Location: Gothenbourg, Sweden
Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 4:47 pm Post subject:
Hi
Ahh Java. Is Neo, or parts of it, written in Java? Could you expand on that a
bit if you feel you have the time?
It could be interesting to talk about that in my Java class.
Quote:
...so the the OOo X11 volunteers decided to "fake it" by making duplicate
copies of all of your fonts...
So if I empty OOos font folder then next time I will only have my enabled fonts?
(Not that I am that interested in running OOo...)
Quote:
There is no recommended minimal set of fonts as fonts don't use any system
resources if they are never used. Only when you use a font does Mac OS X load
the whole font file into memory.
But there is still a reason to keep the font list small. I find it very
unproductive to scroll a font list with 100 fonts in it. So what I wonder is for
instance if the webpages I read will look strange if I take almost everything away.
Quote:
As for how NeoOffice lists fonts, that is a limitation of the OOo design...
As I suspected.
And Patrik, I am not criticizing the design of Neo, nor am I saying that you
don't spend enough time on it. Judging by how fast you answer postings here you
can't be doing much else
I am just curious on how it works. And how to make it work for me.
So one more thing for now. I am "red pill" and you are "The Architect" and there are more of these.
So is there an explanation to these "grades" somewhere?
So if I empty OOos font folder then next time I will only have my enabled fonts?
(Not that I am that interested in running OOo...)
If you have not run OOo since your last reboot, this is correct. However, if you ran OOo since your last reboot, Mac OS X will still keep these fonts in its font list until you reboot. Generally speaking, once a font is used, Mac OS X will keep it in memory so deleting the font file won't take effect until you reboot.
Joined: Jun 20, 2006 Posts: 2051 Location: Midwest, USA
Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 7:18 pm Post subject:
erland wrote:
So one more thing for now. I am "red pill" and you are "The Architect" and there are more of these.
So is there an explanation to these "grades" somewhere?
Erland
In most cases, the grades or titles are based on the number of posts you have made. Most of the names or titles are taken from The Matrix movies. A few people have "custom" titles, denoting their special roles in the community. This includes Patrick (the Architect) and Ed (The One), who are the developers, but also Smokey (Town Crier) and Jake (Ninja). Smokey and Jake have key roles in managing the wiki.
There is an initial list of the ranked titles here. although several titles/ranks have been added since. Among them:
Merovingian, Seraph, Trainperson, the Anomaly (not necessarily in that order).
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