FontShow - displays a single outline font

by Alan Wrigley

FontShow is a useful applications that allows you to drag a single font family to its icon and view the fonts instantly. Acorn users nowadays come across so many fonts, on PD discs, CD collections or the Internet, that it's impossible to keep track of them all, and what is often needed is a quick and simple way to look at a font and see if it's one that you are likely to use in the future and therefore worth storing in your regular font folders.

FontShow is designed to enable you to do this. It is run in the normal way, i.e. by double-clicking on its icon in a filer window. An icon is installed on the icon bar. If you then drag a directory containing a font family to the icon, FontShow will scan the directory to make sure that there are font files inside. If it finds any files called Outlines (or Outlines0 etc.) it will open a window and display all the font faces within the directory in upper and lower case letters. If it doesn't find any font files, an error will be generated.

Please note that you can only drag font family directories to FontShow (e.g. Trinity or Selwyn). If you drag a !Fonts folder, this will not be accepted since it is actually an application directory.

FontShow works by copying the contents of the directory to a temporary font folder in the Scrap directory, and performing a FontInstall on the latter. Each time a new font is dragged to its icon, and also when the application is quit, the temporary folder is uninstalled and removed so that you will not have unwanted fonts cluttering up your system. 

The default font size for the displayed fonts is 18pt. If you wish to alter this to suit your own setup, you can change the value of the variable pointsize% which is defined in the procedure PROCinit.

Copyright  Rheingold Enterprises 1998
