Installing/Removing fonts
Installing/Removing fonts
- Subject: Installing/Removing fonts
- From: "Nathan Herring" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2006 19:06:04 -0800
- Thread-topic: Installing/Removing fonts
We're going through another round of design & specification for how we
deal with installation and removal of Mac Office. One of the sore points
has been how we handle our fonts.
I've reviewed the notes up on
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/ATS_Concepts/
atsfonts_concepts/chapter_2_section_4.html but still have a few
questions.
If a user chooses to install our fonts into the user domain, should we
be checking to see whether those fonts exist already and if it exists,
what version is it? Then if it's
* older - do we delete or disable the old one if it's in the user
domain? or install anyway side-by-side?
* same - do we prompt to replace (as in a "repair" upgrade)? or install
side-by-side? what should we do with enabling?
* newer - do we prompt to do nothing/replace anyway/install
side-by-side?
If a pre-existing file of the same name exists, should we just rename
ours "Font 2" and try again?
Is it preferable to install fonts (on system 10.3 and up) in a folder in
the appropriate fonts folder? e.g., ~/Library/Fonts/Microsoft
If the user decided not to install the fonts into one of the normal
fonts locations, but rather kept it with the Microsoft Office folder (in
some subfolder), should we perform a global activation of it or a local
activation? Do we have to perform activation maintenance at boot time
(in case the user moved the Microsoft Office folder around), or will it
magically work? Is this frowned on or perfectly valid? It seems like it
would cut down on installation headache, including making Drag-n-Drop
installs not have to have a separate font-install step.
What, if anything, should be done with regards to FontBook? For example,
I can manually in FontBook (possibly programmatically via AppleScript)
create a new "Microsoft" font library and point it to my fonts. In what
ways is this different from activating the fonts myself? Should I make a
"Microsoft" collection, or leave it to the user? Can I do that without
invoking the FontBook?
Our uninstall functionality has always avoided handling fonts. This is
in part due to not wanting to crash apps that rely on a font existing
that we've now removed from the Fonts folder. It's also in part due to
not having a good idea of how to do version control, as some fonts had
'vers' resources and others didn't and we didn't have special code to
read the version information out of the font file itself and, frankly,
don't know how to get the version information that FontBook and/or the
Finder displays.
If we wanted to start trying to remove fonts installed by various
versions of Mac Office, should we match exact versions, or font families
or what? I'm thinking of a case where a user had v1 of a font, and Mac
Office distributed v2 of a font, so the user tossed v1 as unnecessary.
There's no good way of handling that case, AFAICT; if anyone has insight
or if there is some standardized way of handling this, I'd love to know.
Also, if there's a better forum to be asking these questions, please let
me know.
Thanks in advance,
Nathan Herring
MacBU SDE/Development
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