site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev@lists.apple.com "Nathan Herring" <nathanh@microsoft.com> wrote: 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 why not put microsoft fonts where they belong? /Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/Fonts/. thanks, don -- don montalvo curmudgeon at large 917-559-5713 donmontalvo@mac.com http://donmontalvo.com _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Installer-dev mailing list (Installer-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/installer-dev/site_archiver%40lists.a... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com