Master MainType, tips and tricks...

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Erwin Denissen
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Master MainType, tips and tricks...

Post by Erwin Denissen »

This tutorials shows you several basic and advanced features to get the most out of MainType.

Filter
Change the Filter through the Filter window available through View -> Filter. This filter is very powerful, when you are looking for specific fonts in a large font list.

Fast font sorting
Click on a column header to sort the font list. Click the same column header to change the sort order.

Export font data to HTML
With MainType you can easily export font data to HTML. Here is the output of a collection of over 4000 fonts:
MainType web export output

Preview Text
The preview text items are used as preview text in the Fonts pane. Go to the Options window to change, add or delete preview text items.

Looking for a character?
You can search for a character in the selected font by its character name as defined in the Unicode Character Database. Select Find on the Edit menu to open the Find Character window.

Drag and Drop
Select one or more fonts and drag them onto another group or browse folder. During the drag and drop operation hold down the Ctrl key to copy the selected fonts or hold down the Shift key to move the font selection or or hold down the Alt key to create shortcuts. You can even drag and drop between MainType and other applications that fully support drag and drop (like Windows explorer).

More tips and tricks are welcome...
Last edited by Erwin Denissen on Tue Feb 06, 2007 8:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
Erwin Denissen
High-Logic
Proven Font Technology
Erwin Denissen
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 11107
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2002 12:41 am
Location: Bilthoven, The Netherlands
Contact:

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Why do some fonts display AbCdEfGhIj as Preview Text?
Initially MainType shows a different preview text (AbCdEfGhIj) for Symbol fonts. You can change this behavior through the Options window (Select Options from the Tools menu and then click the Preview Text tab). At the bottom of this page you can change the preview text used for Symbol fonts. Alternatively you can disable this feature through the "Show this text for Symbol fonts" option.

Symbol fonts are special fonts, that should only include symbols, signs, signatures, pictures, decorations, arrows and bullets. Symbol fonts do not form words so line breaks can occur after any character code. Most spell checkers don't check symbol font-formatted content.

There are Symbol fonts on the market that contain (Latin) characters. Such fonts do cause problems as explained above (e.g. wrong line breaks and no spell checking). In such case you should contact the font vendor.
Erwin Denissen
High-Logic
Proven Font Technology
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