Font Swap Application
by Andrew Benson

With an ever increasing number of outline fonts available for the Archimedes, many floppy disc users will find that they have to have three, four or perhaps even more discs dedicated to fonts. This is fine normally, but suppose that you wanted to work on a DTP program with fonts from your first disc, say Homerton.Medium. Then suppose that you want to use a program such as FontFX which needs to have the Trinity.Medium font, which is on another disc. In this case you have to load up the new fonts disc, double-click on the !Fonts folder and wait for the new fonts to be loaded. Finally, you want to draw a simple picture in Draw which uses no text. It can be very annoying when you have to insert the fonts disc for Draw when you don't even want any fonts. FontSwap will allow you to solve these problems by selecting which disc of fonts you require with a simple menu selection. You can even select no disc at all to stop fonts from being used.

Using FontSwap
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When FontSwap is run its icon will appear on the right-hand side of the icon bar. Click Menu over the icon and you will be presented with the FontSwap menu. The top two menu entries are used for selecting and deleting font discs. The Select entry leads to a submenu which contains a list of all the font discs which FontSwap knows about. Initially there will be only one entry, 'None'.

The 'None' entry will have a tick besides it indicating that there are no fonts present as yet. Now, take one fonts disc and open a filer window onto it. Double-click on the !Fonts folder and wait for the list of fonts to scroll past. If you now select the Add Font option from the FontSwaps menu the new disc will be added to the list below the 'None' entry. The tick will now be against the new entry, indicating that this font disc is currently in use. To add more discs simply repeat the procedure. The list of discs will be sorted in alphabetical order to make it easy to find the disc you need.

To select a new font disc at any time, simply click on the relevant entry on the menu. All applications will now look for fonts on that disc. Selecting 'None' will select no disc, and therefore no fonts. Note: You should be careful when swapping font discs whilst font-using applications are already running, as when they come to redraw their windows they may not be able to find the fonts they are looking for.

The 'Delete' option leads to a submenu which contains a list of all the font discs that FontSwap knows of. Clicking on a disc name here will cause that disc to be deleted from FontSwap's memory. If there are no disc names known by FontSwap the 'Delete' option will be shaded out. The 'Save' option will save a list of the disc names back to disc. You will be asked to insert the disc from which FontSwap was run, if it is not already in the disc drive. The font disc which is currently selected is also remembered and is restored the next time you use FontSwap. You should use 'Save' each time you modify the disc list.

How FontSwap Works
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When you click on the Add Font option the program looks at the system variables Font$Prefix and Font$Path. These variables contain the pathnames for the current !Fonts folders. If the pathname is one which FontSwap doesn't already know it will be added to the fonts list. The program then extracts just the disc name from the pathname, and this is what you see on the menu.

When a font disc is selected FontSwap will *Set Font$Path to the pathname for that disc. If 'None' is selected then FontSwap issues a *UnSet Font$Path and *UnSet Font$Prefix, which effectively removes the pathname to any fonts.

 RISC User 1992
