No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.This is the first episode of a new column for Portland Computer Bits magazine on items of interest to Macintosh users. Although the focus of the column will be on things exclusive to Macs, Wintel users may find information applicable to their platforms, demands they can make of Microsoft and Intel, or at the least, reasons to sell their PCs and buy Macintosh. Send your questions to me at PO Box 1293, Portland, OR 97207 or email mklprc@teleport.com.
Super Fontina makes the Font menu more manageable and PopChar makes the selection of less common characters -- graphical fonts like Zapf Dingbats, and international (high-ascii) characters in all conventional fonts.
Apple has for years supplied the desk accessory Key Caps, which displays a keyboard map and the characters in the selected font. When you hold down the option and opt-shift keys, the map changes to display those characters. If you click on the desired characters they are displayed in the overhead field, which may then be selected, copied and pasted into your document. Not the most elegant solution.
PopChar, written by Günther Blaschek of Austria and released as freeware, solves this in a most elegant way. It installs a user-configurable hot spot on your menubar that drops down a box which displays all the characters in the active font. (See figures 2 & 3, Figs page.) This becomes extremely useful when using a graphical font such as Zapf Dingbats, because every character produces an image.
When you locate the desired character, drag the mouse to it. The key combination you need to type will be displayed at the top of the window, helping you to memorize it for future uses, but if you just release the mouse at this point, that character will be pasted into your document.
The size of the characters can be determined by the user, based on the size of your monitor and the speed of the Mac (Figure 1). Slower Macs with smaller monitors should set the preferred font sizes to 14 12 10 and leave the Maximum Chart Width blank.
There is a 14-page Help manual available at the click of the Help button in the Control Panel. PopChar works in all programs that display a Font menu, except Microsoft programs. Microsoft violates all the Apple programming guidelines, so many extensions fail when running during them. The best guideline is to avoid all Microsoft products unless there are no alternatives (like with Excel). For word processing, prefer WordPerfect or Nisus Writer over Word 5.1 and avoid Word 6.0 entirely. PopChar will still let you select the desired characters, but will not display the correct font, rendering it almost useless.
Download a copy of PopChar.
Fontina lets you choose the font that it uses to display its fontnames. If you have a small monitor, you should choose 9 point Geneva or for style, 12-point Tekton or 10-point Palatino. Larger monitors can let you display in any font that strikes your fancy. Fontina also lets you choose seven of your most-often-used fonts in a personal "knapsack" placed at the beginning of the list, and it displays your selected font in its own style at the top of its window. If you have a fast enough Mac, you can choose to have it display the entire font's alphabet -- don't try this on a IIsi!
Super Fontina costs $69.95 direct from the publisher, Eastgate Systems, PO Box 1307, Cambridge, MA 02238, phone (617) 924-9044. I have yet to find any mail-order house that sells it, so you will need to order it direct. Current version is called "Boston 9.3" and is PowerMac compatible. Eastgate has a Web page, but it relates to their hypertext products and does not mention Fontina at all. Besides, I got a Fatal Error when I last clicked it, so maybe it isn't yet up. Stay tuned.
No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.
email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)