Faster Font  -  Speeds up font cataloguing

by Mark Shaw

This program requires RISC OS 3 or later.

Faster Font speeds up the operating system's process of cataloguing the fonts in your machine at boot-up. Normally this is done by looking through each Fonts directory and making a list of all the font families, weights and styles as they are encountered. However, if the Fonts directory contains a file called Messages1 which lists the available fonts and styles, this is read instead, speeding up the whole process considerably. Faster Font is designed to create this file for you.

The application can be run from the RISC User menu system, or by double-clicking on its icon in a directory viewer. An icon is installed on the icon bar. Clicking Menu over the icon bar icon opens a menu with two options, Info and Quit, which perform their usual functions.

Clicking Select on the icon bar icon opens the main window. To use the application, simply drag a master Fonts directory (i.e. one with a name such as !Fonts, not a font family directory such as Homerton) to the window. You will now see the pathname of the directory displayed in the upper writable icon.

In the lower half of the window is an area headed Style, with four radio buttons labelled Bold, Bold.Italic, Medium and Medium.Italic. Choosing one of these allows you to determine which font style will be chosen if an application only has the font family names on its fonts menu. In other words, if you are using, say, Ovation and the font menu contains Corpus, Homerton and Trinity, then if you have set Faster Font's Bold.Italic button, choosing one of these fonts from the menu means that the bold.italic style will be selected automatically.

When the settings are as you want them, click on the Install icon,
and Faster Font will scan the font directory, making
a list. Once it has finished scanning, it
will save the list inside the font directory under
the name of Messages1.

If fonts are subsequently added to or removed from the directory, the list will not be up to date, and when you come to use the fonts you may find that you cannot do so, or that they are not all on the menu. For this reason, the Messages1 file must be kept up
to date, by running the Fonts directory through Faster Font again.

Copyright  RISC User 1994
