Macking 22

Told You So
Apple's sales are going nowhere but up. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple Macs and Mac clones accounted for 9.5% of general computer sales in December and 11.2% in January. Now might be the time to one-up the pundits and increase your holdings in Apple stock.
(Actually, you should have done that in December, but it's not too late.)

Imagina Dumps US West
As much as anyone can disconnect from our favorite excuse for a local telephone company, anyway. Imagina, the Mac-based ISP has contracted with Electric Lightwave, Inc. to provide high-speed fiberoptic circuits into their office in the Oregon Pioneer Building in downtown Portland. Quoting Jim Rudnick, "This new telecommunications infrastructure will enable Imagina to order new circuits without the pain and delays of working with US West." Is there ANYONE who, given the chance, wouldn't dump US West? Even Microsoft has more fans.

System 7.7 now officially System 8
Just after deadline last month, Apple announced that version 7.7, to be released in July, was such a significant upgrade that it deserved a full point increase. The reasoning was that few people outside the hardcore Mac devotee community identified the name "System 8" with the abandoned "Copland" which was to be the original version 8. This upgrade will have a multi-threaded finder (copy, empty trash and work on a file, simultaneously) and many significant advances. You early adopters be sure to wear thick boots, out there on the "bleeding edge." Remember too that any "late breaking news" in this column is at least three weeks old when you read it, and get onto the Web to find out what's happening now.

Oh no, THREE monitors

This photo was taken with a lovely new product, the Sony Digital Still Camera. I am amazed how much power is stored in this tiny package. Full 640x480 photos, 30 at high quality and 108 at high compression, fit in the camera. It comes with cables for Mac and Wintel, a CD with the software, video cable and power supply. I recommend this for anyone who needs to shoot photos for Web pages. Instant gratification at its best.
I knew it was possible, so it had to be done. I now have three monitors running on my 7100. On the left, an old ugly Apple 640x480 Basic Color Monitor ($70) with a VGA cable and Mac adaptor (bet you didnŐt know Apple ever made such a beast, eh?) driven by the original monitor card that came with my system. In the middle is my Apple 17" Multiscan, an excellent if slightly washed-out unit, driven by a SuperMac Color Graphics Card that I purchased last week for just $200. It was a demo but never registered. It supports millions of colors and video acceleration. On the right, my salvaged Radius FPD greyscale 640x870 (with a broken case) that I resoldered and made work again, driven by the 7100's internal monitor output. Total cost to move from one monitor to three: $270. Of course not all 6100-7100-8100 systems came with monitor cards but those that had 17" monitors did, and those cards are also pretty cheap these days: $60-$90.
Happy scrounging, Mackers!

Font Manipulation
All new and many experienced Mac users are still bedeviled by font management. Messy font folders are very common on many of the machines I see. Thus, a little Fonts 101:
First, there are three kinds of fonts used on Macs. Bitmap fonts, which have either suitcase icons or document icons, and contain the image you see on your screen. The document font will (should) always have the size as part of the name: Helvetica 10; Tekton 14, etc. The font suitcase is a holder for these document fonts and can be named Helvetica, Helvetica.bitmap or even Ugly Fonts; what counts is the font files inside the suitcase. Bitmaps get their name from the fact that the letters are created by defining their shape, pixel by pixel, to display as well as possible given a grid maybe only 9x9 pixels, on up to 24x24 or more. This is how all text is displayed on the Mac, in fact it is how everything is displayed. The system routines that make it all work are called QuickDraw; Display PostScript is what will be used when the new system based on NeXTStep is released. But it's all done with pixels, unlike the old mainframe and DOS worlds, done in alphanumeric characters.
The second kind of font is TrueType, a format Apple developed to force Adobe to stop charging so much for licenses for their PostScript fonts. After Adobe relented, the TrueType format took off on its own, and is now made by Apple and many independent font designers. A TrueType font is much larger than a bitmap; on the order of 30K compared to 6K. It can be inside a suitcase or not; can be named with a ".tt" at the end, but does not have to be. It does not need to have matching bitmap fonts inside the suitcase to work, but you get better screen display if you have both the bitmap and TrueType fonts installed. TrueType is an outline format, but with the ability to create bitmapped screen characters on the fly.
The third type is PostScript, also an outline font, but it works when linked to a bitmap font. By itself a PS font is useless because there is nothing to display on your screen or install in your font menu. PS fonts are never installed in suitcases, but rattle around loose in your fonts folder. Open your Fonts folder and choose By Name in the View menu. You should see suitcases and PostScript documents listed alphabetically. If you double-click on a PS font, it will present a dialog box telling you that it is a PostScript font and where to put it. Double-click on a font suitcase and it will open a window displaying font documents, possibly including a TrueType as well. Note the sizes of the documents, and the icons. TrueType icons have an A with two shadows behind it; bitmap font documents have just the A. Double-click on a font document and a window opens displaying a sentence with every letter of the alphabet, in the actual font and size named. Do the same to a TrueType font and the window will display in 9, 12 and 18 point.
PostScript fonts are downloaded to your printer and permit printing of any size text. In conjunction with Adobe Type Manager, they are also used to display correctly at any point size on your screen. Without ATM or TrueType, your font will look chunky at any but the installed sizes, but if the font is in the printer's ROM, it will print just fine. All printers containing Adobe-licensed PostScript will have the "gang of ten," see Duplicates paragraph, below.
Where people get into trouble is when they install new fonts, especially designers who are regularly receiving fonts from their clients.
When installing a font, never open the System Folder and drag them directly into the Fonts folder. Especially never drag a folder containing the desired fonts in there. The folder will isolate them from the System and they will not load. Open the folder containing the fonts you want to install and drag them, both the font suitcase and accompanying PostScript fonts, onto the icon of the System Folder. You will get a message telling you that "fonts need be installed into the Fonts folder to be available to the Macintosh. Put "(font name)" into the Fonts folder?" with your options being Cancel or OK. If you are ever installing fonts and you do NOT get this message, then your fonts did not install correctly.
If you find any documents whose names end in ".afm", those are Adobe Font Metrics documents and are intended for pre-System 7 Macs and very old programs. Trash them on sight unless you are indeed running System 6.

Duplicates
Installing the same font in two different formats can cause display and spacing problems. Example: Apple installs a basic set of fonts in bitmap and TrueType format: Chicago, Courier, Geneva, Helvetica, Monaco, Palatino, Symbol, Times and Zapf Dingbats. Other installs may include Avant Garde, Bookman, N Helvetica Narrow, New Century Schoolbook and Zapf Chancery (or Apple Chancery). These suitcases usually include the bitmap sizes of 10, 12, 14, 18 and 24. Some will also include size 9. They do NOT include the PostScript versions, but many people, especially after buying a new printer and installing everything, will wind up with both TrueType and PostScript versions of the same font. This may still work correctly on your printer, but is not advised because you may have spacing problems, especially if you move your document to a system that does not have both installed.
Check for this by scanning through your Fonts folder. The PostScript fonts have odd variations on the font's name -- these names should never be changed or they won't print any more -- and the font suitcase, when opened, should not contain any TrueType fonts. If you discover that you have both, then remove the TrueType version if you have a PostScript printer, and the PostScript version if you have an inkjet or other non-PostScript printer. Archive these fonts on disk, cartridge or floppy somewhere in case you ever need them again. If you have both kinds of printers, then you should prefer the PostScript versions, aware that if you disable ATM they won't work on your inkjet any more.
It is also possible to have two copies of the same bitmap font if they are in suitcases with different names. Although PS fonts won't work if renamed, suitcases can be called anything, and multiple bitmap and TrueType fonts can be contained within. Conflict could occur if you had a suitcase called "Apple standard fonts" and it contained the Gang of Ten mentioned above, and the same fonts were also individually named within the fonts folder. I have seen "Helvetica" and "Helvetica.bmap" sitting next to each other, containing the same thing. It is a testament to the robustness of the Mac System software that you can have a messy fonts folder and still be able to use your fonts with only occasional problems.
Take some time (I know, you are busy and have no time) to open your fonts folder and look at every item within. Open all your suitcases and note the contents. Keep a note pad next to you to write down what you see. When you find dupes, prefer the ones that contain more sizes of the same screen font unless your HD is almost full and you aren't planning on getting a larger one. Remove all obvious duplicates but don't Trash them until you are sure that they are truly unneeded.
You may get a message telling you that you can't modify your Fonts folder until you quit all open applications. Yes, that includes Stickies and anything else that is displaying in the Applications menu (rightmost icon in your menubar) besides the Finder.
Suitcase, the font-management utility, along with its competition Master Juggler, offers another way to organize fonts. PostScript outline fonts need not be in the Fonts folder, just in the same folder as a bitmap that is being loaded by Suitcase. Groups of fonts may be created and assigned to specific clients or projects and enabled only when working on specific jobs. This keeps the number of fonts available at all times to a more useful minimum; otherwise the font menu extends off the bottom of your screen onto your lap. There is not enough room here to write about how to use Suitcase to organize your fonts, but if you have more than a couple of dozen in your fonts menu, then you should buy the product and study the manual. $69 through the User Group Connection. Join PMUG or your local user group to qualify to buy from this catalog.

Partitioning Your Hard Drive
Mike Gauland writes,
Q: I'll be getting a new hard drive soon (hopefully installed in a new Mac, as well), and it will be far larger (2+G) than anything I've used before (500 M). I know I'll waste less space and improve performance if I partition it into several smaller drives, but how should I go about this? I don't mean the mechanics as much as deciding how many partitions to create, how large they should be, and what to put on each one.
A: The whys of partitioning can be found in the documentation that comes with some formatting software (Silver Lining; FWB, etc.) but the best way to partition is somewhat subjective and based on how you work.
For the boot volume, do a Get Info on your System Folder (and also the Apple Extras folder) and assign approximately double that amount to your startup volume. Call it 1-System, or something alphabetically higher than any other volume you create. (This is to make it easier for the Mac to start up because it will look on each volume, in alphabetical order, for a functioning System Folder.) Placing a space before the name will also do this, and adding a space after the name will make it appear centered and a little neater. This volume should also contain all your utilities and system tools, in a folder called Utilities Folder, or something like that. It should also contain the Apple Extras folder, which should always be at the root (first level) window. The reason is that Apple's installers and updaters look for this folder there and create a new one if not found. With the exception of Apple Extras and the System Folder, which should not be renamed, you should always end your folder names with the symbol you get when you hold the Option key and type an f. This semi-official convention saves you endlessly typing f-o-l-d-e-r and instantly identifies folders when, for whatever reason, you see only a name and not the icon.
The other volumes should be, for example, 2-Applications, 3-Text Files, 4-Images and 5-Other Stuff. The Applications volume should be about twice the size of your current Applications Folder. If you haven't clustered all your apps in such a folder, do so now, then see how big it is.
The size and names of the other three volumes are purely subjective. If you seldom work on images, you won't need a dedicated volume, but you also won't need as big a hard drive. The Text Files volume should be between 30 and 60 megabytes in size. This is where you will put all those word-processing, PDF and other documents that are usually smaller than 32K. The largest volume should be reserved for your scans and other images, and the Photoshop scratch files, set in Photoshop's Preferences. Volume four, in my own case, contains everything pertaining to the Net, including the applications I use on it, the exception to the Applications volume. It is 300 megs, and half full. My Apps volume is 550 megs, 329 of which are used. The biggest one on my desktop is Other Stuff, 700 megs, and it contains CD-ROM starters, archived installers, a backup of my 168-meg System Folder to fall back on during my upgrade to 7.6, and all kinds of "other stuff." Photoshop scratch files go there. My startup volume is also 300 megs and has only 56 megs remaining.
And yes, my home looks pretty much the same way, but not as roomy.
P.S.: If you simply want to rename your hard drive and find that you cannot, go to Control Panels, open Sharing Setup and click on Stop Sharing. Then rename your hard drive volume(s) and click Start Sharing again (assuming you need to, of course).

FaxBack for Mac
From SmallBiz Digest: "I have seen a lot of PC modems that advertise voice and fax and FAX BACK capabilities (most are around $150.00!), but nothing lately for the Mac. Does anyone know of a way to set up a fax back system on a Mac?"
Among others (like Cypress), take a look at MicroMat's PhoneMaker.

Construction software redux
From the Macintosh Construction Forum website:
"MCF is your complete information source on Mac software for building & design. Every issue is packed with in-depth software reviews, the latest on new programs, case studies and tips on automating your design or construction office with the Mac."

Networking Macs and PCs
From the SmallBiz Email List:

>Can anyone recommend a product that will allow
>a Windoze 95 machine to connect to a
>plain vanilla AppleTalk
>network and print to a HP printer?

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.)