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better handling of intersecting groups

Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2014 1:29 pm
by bradley
Greetings. New purchaser, in the process of switching my way-of-life over to Win7 before the XPacolypse.

Let's say I have a pair of groups: bestGroup and goodGroup, for example. 'bestGroup' is a collection of around 400 A-List fonts that I always want installed (Helvetica, Garamond, etc.). 'goodGroup' is a grab bag of all the fonts (2500) that I used to have installed and active (culled from 20,000 or so) on my old XP system, where I'm still using ATM.

Anyway, the groups have some intersection, as I created bestGroup by duplicating the goodGroup and then deleting all the ancillary, rarely-if-ever-used fonts from list.

I plan to keep bestGroup installed at all times, and and only install/uninstall the goodGroup as needed. The problem is that when I uninstall goodGroup, it will uninstall fonts that also appear in bestGroup. Ideally, I'd like the program to maintain a link-count when it installs/uninstalls fonts such that when I install goodGroup, it notes that some of the fonts have already been installed, and merely increments their link-count. Then, later, when I uninstall goodGroup, it decrements the link-counts of all the fonts in the group, and only actually uninstalls the ones that are now at zero, i.e. not members of some other installed group.

Or something like that.

I can work around it, and after uninstalling some group run around and re-install all the other groups that should still be installed, just in case any of their fonts got uninstalled, but that'd be annoying if I had a bunch of groups.

It also wouldn't be an issue if I made sure that the groups were non-intersecting, but I don't see any reasonable way of ensuring or verifying that; can't display two groups side-by-side (that I know of), and even if you could that would be more than a little tedious.

Cheers,
--John Bradley

Re: better handling of intersecting groups

Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2014 2:50 pm
by Erwin Denissen
bradley wrote:It also wouldn't be an issue if I made sure that the groups were non-intersecting, but I don't see any reasonable way of ensuring or verifying that; can't display two groups side-by-side (that I know of), and even if you could that would be more than a little tedious.

With this work-around your current ratings will be lost, so use with care:

- Go to the goodGroup, select all, and rate them as "Good".
- Next go to the bestGroup, and rate them all as "Very Good".

Now go back to the goodGroup, and remove the "Very Good" ones. You can sort or group by rating for ease of locating those.

Let us know your results.

Re: better handling of intersecting groups

Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2014 2:25 am
by MikeW
Nice tip, Erwin. Thanks.