[X Newbies] adding fonts

[Florin Alexander Neumann]

On Thursday, Jul 24, 2003, at 12:54 Canada/Eastern, TheMacintoshLady 
wrote:

> It would have been nice if there could have been just one location like
> there used to be and one method of installing. Definitely not user
> friendly!

Not at all. In fact, it would have been very bad indeed. A corrupt font 
could have crashed the entire system (as it used to happen in 9). My 
wife's fonts could not have been kept separate from my own fonts -- 
doesn't any modern marriage have enough stresses already? If an 
application had required a special font (e.g., for terminal emulation) 
of no earthly use to anyone else, it could not have been kept separate 
from the other fonts. An office manager would have had to manage each 
Mac on her network individually to make sure they all had a consistent 
complement of fonts. A casual user could have wiped out fonts used by 
the system to draw the menus and dialogue boxes, with dire consequences.

There are really two ways you can go about it. You can think of X as a 
souped-up version of 9, and try to change your ways as little as 
possible, and run into all sorts of pickles, all the while complaining 
about this which was poorly thought-out and that which is not 
user-friendly. Or you can think of X as a completely new operating 
system, with some similarities to OS 9 -- and some similarities to 
Windows, for that matter -- and learn from scratch to do things the OS 
X way.

The OS X font locations scheme makes little sense for a antiquated 
single-user OS, as was the 'Classic' Mac, but it makes perfect sense 
for a networked multi-user environment. The fly in the ointment is the 
Classic fonts folder, but that can't be helped -- it's required for 
legacy applications.

However, Apple was amiss in not providing the user with a method of 
controlling fonts. The scheme is perfectly logical, but the user should 
have had the possibility of seeing at a glance which font was where and 
whether he could disable it -- somewhat in the fashion of Stephane 
Sudre's Diablotin. By all accounts, Panther's Font Book goes some way 
towards providing this, but it should have been implemented at least in 
v10.1, not in v10.3.

f