The Text Window Isn’t All That Received a Makeover
Something quite amazing happened with the release of Mac OS X 10.3, the core Text Services that all Cocoa applications use to handle text fields, text areas, and even whole documents was upgraded. Actually, overhauled is a better term.
New features:
- Single and double underline with choice of color
- Single and double strike with choice of color
- Background color
- Drop shadow
- Custom styles
- Automatic ligatures
- Automatic diacritics
- Letter case defaults
- Superiors
- Automatic fractions
- Automatic typographic letters (em, en, smart quotes)
- Ability to take “computer” math symbols and make “standard” symbols (* becomes x)
- Various other character replacements
- Can now set the range for the size slider as well as favorite sizes
- Amazing character browser
- Direct control over sets and integration with Font Book
- Full right-to-left support
And now, a little browsing…
The New Text Window

When you press Command-T in any Cocoa program (and a few Carbon) you get the standard Text Services palette window. The first time you do this in Panther, be ready for an interesting upgrade as there are some new icons I’ll get to in a bit. So, from here you can pick a font, a size, and setup collections, as you are used to. The things that have changed are kind of obvious at first glance:
- Search – You can now search for a font name by typing bits of the name.
- Underline, Strike, Color, and Background controls.
- Drop Shadow controls.
- An Extras menu at the bottom

From either menu you have the same choices: none, one, or two lines and a menu item that opens a color palette to choose the color. You can have black text with a green underline and two red strikes if you so desire.

Next to those controls are the new controls for Drop Shadows. Left to right they are Distance, Blur, Fade, and Angle. They work beautifully.

But Wait! There’s More!

The remainder of the new features are in the Extras menu. They are:
- Add to Favorites
- Show/Hide Preview
- Show/Hide Effects
- Color…
- Characters…
- Typography…
- Edit Sizes…
The top four are obvious. The fifth, Characters, pulls up the Character Palette. This was available (albeit hidden) in Jaguar, so not having used this before, really, I’ll dive into a few of it’s more interesting features.


The main area hasn’t changed from 10.2. You have a listing of various categories of characters and then the glyphs on the right. What I noticed, and this may or may not be new but it’s certainly cool, is that there is a Related Characters area that shows you variations of the glyph you are looking at. Even better is the fact that you can also see what this glyph looks like in all the other installed fonts that have it! Very cool when looking for just the right shape.
Then, of course, with thousands of characters in Unicode having a Favorites group is always a good idea.
It’s the favorite glyph, not font, so you can pick the© symbol and then it will show that in whatever font you’ve chosen, if it’s in your Favorites group.

I’m saving Typography for last, so a quick look at a simple, but handy, feature. The list of sizes on the right can now be customized. You can set the minimum and maximum sizes on the slider, set the entries in the fixed list, or turn either off. Handy for people like me that set the max to 500…
The Manage Fonts link goes to Font Book, which is simply a whole other article.
A Quick Glance Elsewhere


On the ruler there’s a new menu as well. We have styles! Nothing huge about the implementation, but the styles are system-wide, like favorites, and can remember the font style, the ruler, or both. Once on the list, they are available wherever Text Services is used. As you add Favorites, they show in the list.

Hidden in the new default Text menu is a toggle for Writing Direction. With the typography settings I’ll get into in a minute, this will just end up being plain embarrassing for Microsoft when it comes to Middle Eastern language support.
A Typography Dream

Mac OS X also allows for a wide variety of typographic control based on which font is in use. Here’s a list of the ones I’ve seen. This is not a definitive list and not all fonts will have all features (indeed, not one has them all, though Helvetica and other full Unicode fonts seem to have more). Some fonts have special features unique to them (Zaphino and Hoefler Text come to mind). Each item has the name of a font where the feature can be found.
- Adornments
- Off (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Black Circle (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Black Round Square (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Black Square (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Circle (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Double Circle (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Parenthesis (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Round Square (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Square (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Roman Numerals (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Alternate Letters
- Use Alternate Capitals (Herculanum)
- Use Alternate Lowercase (Herculanum)
- Character Alternates
- No Alternates (Hoefler Text)
- Alternates (Hoefler Text)
- Small Caps Alternates (Hoefler Text)
- Character Alternatives
- No Character Alternatives (Helvetica)
- Password Style (Helvetica)
- Broken Vertical Bar (Helvetica)
- Comma Diacritic Forms (Helvetica)
- Combine (checkbox) (Osaka)
- Compose (checkbox) (Osaka)
- Design Complexity
- Simple Design Level (Apple Chancery)
- Elegant Design Level (Apple Chancery)
- Flourishes Set A (Apple Chancery)
- Flourishes Set B (Apple Chancery)
- Diacritics
- Compose Diacritics (Helvetica)
- Don’t Compose Diacritics (Helvetica)
- Fractions
- No Fractions (Helvetica)
- Basic Fractions (Helvetica)
- Horizontal (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Vertical (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- (a group of popup buttons, one per character in the currently-selected text that has a variant) (Hoefler Text and many others)
- On (checkbox) (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Hebrew Diacritics
- Show Hebrew Diacritics (Lucida Grande)
- Hide Hebrew Diacritics (Lucida Grande)
- Hige Glyphs
- No Change (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- On (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Off (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- On (checkbox) (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- On (checkbox) (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- On (checkbox) (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Proportional Japanese Glyphs (Osaka)
- Kana Widths
- No Change (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Full Widths (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Half Widths (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Proportional Widths (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Large Capitals
- No Change (Papyrus)
- Large Capitals (Papyrus)
- Alternate Large Capitals (Papyrus)
- Letter Case
- No Change (Helvetica)
- All Capitals (Helvetica)
- All Lower Case (Helvetica)
- Initial Capitals (Helvetica)
- Small Caps (Hoefler Text)
- Ligatures
- Common Ligatures (Helvetica)
- Rare Ligatures (Helvetica)
- Logo Ligatures (Helvetica)
- Rebus Ligatures (Helvetica)
- Diphthong Ligatures (Helvetica)
- Squared Ligatures (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Squared abbreviations (LiSong Pro)
- Special Ligatures (Zaphino)
- Icelandic Ligatures (Capitals)
- Mathematical Extras
- Hyphen to Minus (Helvetica)
- Star to Multiply (Helvetica)
- Slash to Divide (Helvetica)
- Inequality Ligatures (Helvetica)
- Number Case
- Lower Case Numbers [where some digits drop below the baseline]
- Upper Case Numbers [what we normally see when using computers]
- Old Styles (Apple Chancery)
- Lining Numbers (Apple Chancery)
- Number Spacing
- Monospaced Numbers (Hoefler Text)
- Proportional Numbers (Hoefler Text)
- Number Character Widths
- No Change (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Third Widths (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Quarter Widths (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Old-style Numbers (Didot)
- Oldstyle Figures (checkbox) (Zaphino)
- Roman Widths
- No Change (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Full Widths (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Half Widths (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Proportional Widths (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- On (checkbox) (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- On (checkbox) (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Smart Swashes
- Archaic Long s Swash (checkbox) (Hoefler Text) [uses the Old English s which looks much like a modern ‘f’]
- Word Initial Swashes (Apple Chancery)
- Word Final Swashes (Apple Chancery)
- Line Initial Swashes (Apple Chancery)
- Line Final Swashes (Apple Chancery)
- Non-Final Swashes (Apple Chancery)
- Avoid d-collisions (checkbox) (Zaphino)
- Style Options
- No Style Options (Hoefler Text)
- Engraved Text (Hoefler Text)
- Stylistic Variants
- No Change (Zaphino)
- First Variant glyph set (Zaphino)
- ...
- Eighth Variant glyph set (Zaphino)
- Subscript
- Off (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Subscript (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Superscript (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- On (checkbox) (Hiragino Mincho Pro)
- Typographic Extras
- Hyphens to Em Dash (Helvetica)
- Hyphen to En Dash (Helvetica)
- Vertical Position
- Normal Vertical Position (Helvetica)
- Superiors (Helvetica)
- Inferiors (Hoefler Text)
- Substitute Vertical Forms (checkbox) (Osaka)
- Vietnamese Double Accents
- Use Right Accents (Lucida Grande)
- Use Left Accents (Lucida Grande)
- Use Centered Accents (Lucida Grande)
- Unicode Annotations
- No Change (Hei)
- Circle Annotations (Hei)
- Parenthesis Annotations (Hei)
- Canonical decomposition (checkbox) (Helvetica CY)
- Yiddish Digraphs (checkbox) (Lucida Grande)

Remember, too, that Text Edit can open and save Word documents now. If you don’t need a Works package, and you don’t need Word, you can live without it now much more easily. In fact, if you do without Word then you have your hands on the most powerful default typography system in the world.