The Font Manager for RISC OS 3

by Bill Wallace


If you've been taking advantage of all the font offers currently being advertised, then you will probably have discovered that having a large number of fonts stored on your hard drive can be more of a problem than a pleasure.

Finding the right style of font out of a selection of several hundred is difficult enough, but if you use several font directories, you can end up generating the dreaded 'Buffer overflow' error if the Font$Path alias (used to identify to RISC OS where your fonts are located) grows longer than 255 characters.

Font Manager provides an excellent solution to this problem. It allows you to group different styles of fonts (e.g. Serif, Gothic, Open, Headline, etc.) into unique font directories that are recognised by their distinctive icons. Double-clicking on any of the font directory icons will add their paths to Font$Path, thus installing them ready for use. When you have finished using the fonts in a particular font directory, just double-click on its icon again. This will de-install that specific directory, and remove its reference from Font$Path.

USING FONT MANAGER
Running FontMan, by either clicking on its icon in the RiscDisc Menu System, or double-clicking on its icon in the Filer window, will open up a Filer window containing the following items:
   Desktop15
   Desktop31
   !F1
   !F2
   !F3
   !F4
   !F5
   !F6
   !F7
   !F8
   !F9
   !Fonts

Desktop15 and Desktop31 are Desktop Boot Files that install the font directory icons on the Pinboard in either Mode 15 or Mode 31. !F1 to !F9 are the font directories, and should be copied onto your hard drive, either into the root directory, or, for a tidier directory structure, into a directory called Fonts. The font directory !Fonts is a duplicate of the standard !Fonts directory supplied with RISC OS 3, although it does not contain the actual fonts. If you already have !Fonts on your hard drive, you can ignore the duplicate, otherwise copy it onto your hard drive.

The icons for !F1 to !F9 represent the following styles of fonts:
   !F1 - Open Fonts
   !F2 - Smooth Fonts
   !F3 - Script Fonts
   !F4 - Fancy Fonts
   !F5 - Sharp Fonts
   !F6 - Poster Fonts
   !F7 - Gothic Fonts
   !F8 - Effect Fonts
   !F9 - Primary Fonts

In order to enable Font Manager to install and de-install specific groups of fonts from the Font$Path, you will need to make a small change to the FontCheck Basic program in each of the font directories !F1 to !F9.

First of all, copy your fonts into the relevant directories. For example, the font directory !F4 is for fancy fonts such as Tube and Bubble. (To open a directory that is prefixed with an !, hold down the Shift key and double-click on it.)

Then load the Basic file FontCheck into Edit by holding down the Shift key and double-clicking on it. Look for the following line:
   REM Change f$ to the first font name in the directory
For the !F4 FontCheck program, the line immediately following this will be:
   f$="Tube"

Change Tube to the name of the first font in that directory. (i.e. If you put Bubble, Tube and Shiver in the !F4 directory, you would change Tube to Bubble.

Save the FontCheck file by pressing F3 and clicking on OK. And that's all there is to it.

Whenever you now double-click on !F4, the FontCheck program will check if the Bubble font is already present in the font list, and if not, will install the fancy fonts. If Bubble is in the font list, then all the fancy fonts will be de-installed.

Do the same for the rest of the font directories, and you will no longer have problems remembering where a specific font is, or having too many fonts installed at the same time.

 RISC User 1993
