Macking 71

No More Qworst
Since getting DSL, and after reading an article in last month's Wired, I have come to the conclusion that the telco abomination from Hell that Oregon has had to live with is finally dead.
When Qwest took over US Worst I had little faith that anything would change. Companies that size usually get worse, not better. But I learned in the article that Qwest management fired the whole lot of pompous, self-righteous Harvard-MBA suits that had made phone service here such a nightmare, and set about fixing the ten years of neglect.
Every time I have contacted the company's service department I have talked to people who seemed to care. I got the sense that finally, even though the CS people are in another state, they are living under a mandate to do a good job.
When DSL first started becoming available, it usually took five weeks and several calls and personal visits to get the service working. My service, scheduled to be turned on April 2nd, was indeed on and working when I plugged in the supplied router. They even sent me the Mac kit instead of mistakenly sending the Windows kit, as had happened to so many people last year.
It isn't easy to make an ocean liner change direction. Commands must be given and then it takes time for the steaming hulk to respond. But responding it is, and it looks like Oregon has a good phone company again. I hope it sticks.
Read the Wired article for yourself. Just go to Wired and search on Qwest. There are several features. This is a very interesting company!
With the good news comes the bad: I just learned that anyone who is using qwest.net is going to be sold to Microsoft. Qwest is selling their entire ISP customer base to MSN, who will become your new ISP. If you want to abandon ship now, or wait until it happens, I must tell you that I have been with SpiritOne for years and am completely happy. (My domain and web pages, however, are hosted by IWeb4Biz.)

Font Management
One of the most vexing hobgoblins harassing Mac users, especially designers, is dealing with fonts. Their complexity and the opportunities to get things seriously screwed up has caused not a little hair pulling among Mackers over the years. I'd like to attempt shedding some light and maybe reduce Rogaine sales a tad.
First, the basics. There are two kinds of fonts, bitmap and outline. Bitmap fonts are made up of pixels, and are created to look their best on screen at a specific point size. Most bitmap, or screen, fonts are shipped in five sizes: 10, 12, 14, 18 and 24 points. Specialty fonts can include 36 point or larger, and Apple fonts included with the system, such as Times, New York and Geneva, also include a 9-point size. City fonts (the latter two) and others like Chicago and Monaco, are specifically designed to look best as screen fonts, and are the default fonts for windows, menus and dialog boxes.
Outline fonts are designed for printing, and come in two formats: PostScript Type 1 (Type 3 is no longer being made and is not supported in post-System 7 Macs) and TrueType. PostScript fonts do not work by themselves, requiring a bitmap font for screen display. They are automatically downloaded to PostScript printers when used in your documents, and can print at any point size. Bitmaps tend to look chunky and odd when displaying at a non-standard size (19 point, 41, 66, etc.) but the outline makes the print OK.

Figure 1 shows the six kinds of fonts you are most likely to encounter. First is the classic Suitcase icon. Second is a single point size bitmap font, third is a TrueType font. Note the A with two shadows behind it and the fact that there is no size number in the name. Figure 2 shows what you will see when you double-click on a TT font (left) and a bitmap font (right, but a different font from the example). Even though the 9-point sample is ugly and unreadable, it will look fine when printed.

Occasionally, a font will ship in the document format only ( Fig. 1, items 2 and 3) and it will work this way. A bitmap without an accompanying outline font will display correctly only at the stated point size, and will print only at this size at 72-dpi. Don't use a font like that for printing.
The bottom three items in Fig. 1 are PS outline fonts. The odd names must not be changed or the font will no longer link to its bitmap version, although you can rename a suitcase anything (Bob, Fluffy, OddFont) and it will continue to work and the correct name will appear in the Font menu of all your applications. The last icon is different because the slanted A design is used exclusively on Adobe fonts.
Adobe provides a free utility called ATM, or Adobe Type Manager, which uses the outline font to smooth out the appearance of the bitmap on screen at the odd sizes, and lets you get the same kind of smooth output on an inkjet printer as a PostScript printer. The current version is 4.6.1 and is available for download from Adobe's web site.

TrueType fonts accomplish the same function, but combine both bitmap and outline codes (mathematical representations of the shape of the characters in the font) in the same "suitcase" and may be, but do not need to be, combined with bitmap fonts of specific sizes (Fig. 3) They display correctly at all point sizes on screen and print on inkjets without needing ATM. They also print on PostScript printers, but have been known to cause problems with high-resolution imagesetter printers (1200 dots per inch or higher, film or negative output). Service bureaus with these devices recommend that you use only PostScript fonts in your documents.
All of Apple's included fonts are in TrueType format (as are all fonts used on Windows machines, which can also use PostScript if necessary).

Trouble begins
Where users first start getting into trouble is when a particular font is installed with both PostScript and TrueType outlines in the Fonts folder. This happens when you install any Adobe product (Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.). You can't tell by just looking in your fonts folder, either. You must actually double-click on each suitcase icon to see if there are any TT fonts inside. You should remove the TT fonts only if there are also bitmaps in the same suitcase. To protect yourself, make a folder on your hard drive called "Removed TrueTypes" and move them into that folder so you can replace them should you ever need to. Occasionally a font will not work without the TT font, even though you have both the bitmap and the PS outline. It's rare, but it happens.

Trouble continues
Oh, what a mess your fonts folder can harbor. If you are ever moving fonts around and you accidentally drag one suitcase icon on top of another, the contents of that suitcase are copied into the other, and the original disappears. To fix this problem, duplicate the suitcase that contains both fonts, and then remove the incorrect fonts from one, keeping the name, and remove the other fonts from the duplicate, and rename it. That will get you back to where you were before.
There is no way to tell if this has happened to you unless you double-click every font suitcase you have and examine the contents.
If you seemed to have "lost" a font and reinstall it, then you will have two suitcases that contain the same font, and a font conflict occurs. They may not show up correctly in the Fonts menu, or may show up twice, or not print correctly.
Font families can be combined in a single suitcase and this is sometimes done to overcome the limitation of 128 suitcases in the Fonts folder. (More than this and the ones alphabetically higher than 129 do not load.) Beware of conflicts, though.

Font Management Utilities
If you use a lot of fonts, as all graphics people must, you absolutely need a utility to manage and organize them. There are four on the market today, Suitcase 9 from Extensis, Adobe Type Reunion Deluxe, Font Reserve, and FontJuggler (which may no longer be available). It has been my experience over the years that the least troublesome of the lot is Suitcase. Font Reserve showed promise, especially for those who must manage literally thousands of fonts, but all too often users have had to give up on it and switch to Suitcase because of odd behavior and conflicts with Quark or Illustrator. Still, the program has lots of fans. I personally recommend Suitcase to all my clients. Version 8.2 will work with OS 9.1.
If you use less than 50 or 60 fonts you can put them all in Fonts and you don't need to bother with a font-management utility.
All your Fonts folder, inside the System Folder, should contain is the standard fonts that are installed by Apple and other program-specific fonts. (Quicken, Acrobat, and Microsoft all install their own fonts, among others.) Do remove Arial, though. It looks terrible at small sizes and is increasingly being used by web designers who use FrontPage. Your system will substitute Geneva on screen.
Every other font you own should be kept inside a single folder named "Fonts for Suitcase" or "Client Fonts" or anything you want to call it, except simply "Fonts." That name should be reserved exclusively for the folder inside the System Folder.
Do not store your Fonts for Suitcase folder inside the System Folder! Keep it in the main window of your hard drive, or inside the Documents folder.
It is perfectly acceptable to store, within this folder, all of your fonts organized by folders, with each font family inside its own folder. It isn't necessary, however. You can also remove all the folders and store the whole mess as loose fonts sorted alphabetically. This will unite the suitcase with its accompanying outline fonts. For easy sorting and moving into the Suitcase 9 application window, switch to Sort List By Kind either from the View menu or simply clicking on the Kind button at the top of the open Finder window. This of course works only if you have NOT separated all your font families with individual folders.
All Adobe fonts ship with documents ending with the extension .AFM. These are Adobe Font Metrics and are required only on Macs running System 6 or earlier. If you do a Find on your hard drive for anything that ends in .afm (upper or lower case) you can move all such files to the Trash.
Finally, some fonts, both Adobe and others, begin with the letters ITC. This stands for International Typeface Corporation and are part of the name of fonts licensed from that organization. With the sole exception of ITC Eras, which contains ITC in the name of the outline font, you should delete ITC from the name of the suitcase font file. This will help unite the suitcase and outline fonts alphabetically. My guess is many of you will discover you have both ITC Zapf Dingbats and Zapf Dingbats (and Avant Garde, among others) in your Fonts folder. Remove one or combine the two suitcases.
This is a fairly deep scratch on the surface of the possible problems you can have with your font collections, but should be enough to help you clean up most of the mess. I have had client jobs that took half a day to clean and organize. Graphics shops and other businesses that have networked Macs and move jobs from machine to machine should create a master folder of fonts and then duplicate that folder on all the Macs, never adding another font to an individual machine without making sure it is also in the master font folder. Using a network font server and Suitcase or Font Reserve to load fonts across the network works for some people, but has been known to fail miserably for others. Keep it simple!

Letters
Mark Buchholz writes, I've done DSL into a network with and without a firewall/router.
Honestly, unless you're in OS X, on a Mac you have little to worry about from crackers or script kiddies. Even with OS X, it's not going to be as easy to crack as a WinNT/2K or Win9x box. Or even a Linux box.
Here is what I did. First, I got an account through Aracnet with multiple IP numbers and ran them through a hub.
Later I tried the LinkSys 4 port...but it wasn't able to do the level of NAT and DHCP that I wanted, and it blocked AppleTalk from its network.
The LinkSys can be configured from a Mac, but I decided to run only my Windows 2000 box through it because I wasn't happy with the blocked AppleTalk.
That's why I now recommend the MacSense router/firewall instead. It is much more Mac-friendly and does pass AppleTalk.

Suitcase for X
Michael Wong writes, My name is Michael Wong and I am the Product Manager for Extensis Suitcase. I recently read and enjoyed your "Macking 70" article in the May 2001 edition of Computer bits.
As the product manager of a Font Management product, one part of your article stood out from the rest. Specifically the part that reads "...Suitcase and ATM are no longer necessary. Font management is built in ... including the ability to create sets and open them only when needed.". This statement is not necessarily true.
Mac OS X does not have any built in font management. The new Font Panel that Apple introduces in Mac OS X is not a font manager. It only allows you to group fonts that reside in any of the four font directories into "collections". It does not allow users to open and close fonts. Furthermore, the Font Panel is available only to Cocoa applications. Any Carbonized applications will not be able to take advantage of the Font Panel.
Adobe has announced that at present, they have no plans to create a version of ATM Deluxe that runs on Mac OS X.
You can read about Extensis' plans for Suitcase and its other products on Mac OS X on our site..
We've also put together a little piece on Fonts and OS X. Visit for more information.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.