An old font browser program for reference...

[siriusbox]

Just check the excellent (but sadly discontinued) work of Sue Fisher on her program The Font Thing...

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~scef/tft.html

It has a clearer interface, using tabs for each type of visulization instead of separate windows, zoom characters are implemented double clicking over them, I worked with her some years ago suggesting a mouseover zoom when you move over the characters.

Font rendering in text/font preview is a lot of fast, and the sliders for change the size are more usable too.

Hope you can get good ideas from this great old font viewer.

Best regards.

[Erwin Denissen]

Hi siriusbox,

Thanks for your comment. We can't make all people happy with one software solution. I know a lot of people who want to see the character grid and font information at the same time. We have implemented a Character popup feature as shown in this preview of MainType 2.1.


Personally I don't like the size slider, it takes too much space. Font rendering is maybe not as fast because MainType has several sophisticated features that ensure you will always see the actual preview. For example try and view 2 or more copies of a single font and like all other font managers, The Font Thing will fail. See the screenshots below.



We hope to release MainType 2.1. within a couple of weeks.

[Dave Crosby]

It is like designing a home.

You have a space - say 30' X 70' to work in.
Make the Master Bedroom larger, and something else has to get smaller.
Add an indoor pool and something else has to go, the family room, office, or den.

Otherwise you end up having to get a jet plane to go from the entry to the dining room.

[siriusbox]

Hi Erwin,

I know, btw your program allows a lot of GUI flexibility but sometimes intesive software development has a drawback, sometimes it gets absurdly complex.

Anyway I think that a tabbeb interface could work pretty well, I mean as an addon, you can keep the flexibility of windows, but adding a tab zone where drag windows as you want.

Current windows captions are a bit bloated it helps saving space in vertical but get a bit busy when you have small windows in horizontal, limiting the size of input fields and other components too. In the case of Fonts window I think that the Installation/Load/etc.. icons could be moved down, specially when Browse tab is selected, because this icons affect to previewed text and it appears on bottom.

Keep Zoom window if a live zoom will be implemented in character window result in a redudant feature, I mean, the logical use is that I need to open Character window to see them, if I want too zoom a character the new feature do the work, and btw it doesn't take more GUI space.

Finally I prefer speed in previewing that the avility to edit the text in the sample window, in fact I personally prefer to edit directly in the text field, maybe if the sample window will only work as a view window without advanced edit features it could perform better. I edit text in my main programs, Photoshop, Freehand, etc, a font viewer should be focused to font organization, previewing, but not editing.

Of course all these suggestions are only from my personal opinion.

Excuse my poor english.

Best regards.

[Erwin Denissen]

I've uploaded your image here as well.


I'll try to respond to your suggestions later.