FontView - Fast and friendly font viewer

by Keith Vernon


FontView allows you review your fonts and compare different sized fonts in colour on coloured backgrounds. It can be loaded by double-clicking on its icon in the directory display or by clicking on its icon in the RISC User menu program.

Once it is loaded an icon will appear on the icon bar. This can be clicked on to open the main FontView window and a Font control window. The font size and colours may be adjusted using the various arrow icons in this window. The Default colours button will set the colours to the original black text on a light grey background. A string may be entered in the writable icon beneath the Colours section. Pressing Return will display this string in the second line of the FontView window.

The Apply anti-aliasing button may be switched on and off to show the effect of anti-aliasing on the text. Anti-aliasing is the process where pixels with colours in the range between the text colour and the background colour are placed around the edge of the text to make the text look smoother.

To change the current font click Menu when the pointer is over the main FontView window and a menu list of all available fonts will be presented. When making selections remember to use the Adjust button to retain the menu structure. The Font & cache data icon will open a window showing the current configuration of the font manager. This has consequences on the speed and quality of font painting.

FontMax2 is the configured setting which determines when anti-
aliasing is in use. At font sizes greater than the FontMax2 setting, anti-aliasing will not be used in font painting.

FontMax3 is the configured setting which determines when fonts are retained as bitmaps in the font cache. The painting speed is greatly affected by low values of FontMax3 since characters larger than the FontMax3 size must be converted to bitmaps every single time they are drawn.

If you wish to change the displayed character set then a file called Characters in the FontView application directory can be altered as necessary. To reach it, hold down shift and double-click on the !FontView icon in a directory display or click on the icon in the RISC User menu program. This will open a new directory containing the Characters file. Load the file into Edit or DeskEdit and enter your desired character set. The file may contain a maximum of eight lines. The new character set will be used the next time that FontView is run.


 Copyright RISC User 1994