Laughing stock: cattle with a sense of humor.
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Panther's Major Text Services UpgradeOctober 24, 2003 - 4:42am
The 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. The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types—the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution. — G.K. Chesterton [1924] |
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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.
