If you can’t laugh at yourself I’ll laugh at you.
Panther's Major Text Services UpgradeThe Text Window Isn’t All That Received a MakeoverSomething 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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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. 
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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.
Quotes
“People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad . . . The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable . . . It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob . . . It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to avoid them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.” — Orthodoxy, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1908, 100-101 – G. K. Chesterton
