Font front furthered.
A big weakness of the RISC OS font manager lies in the way in which it handles and organises lots of fonts from the user’s perspective – which is to say, it doesn’t, not in a meaningful or sensible way*. Normally, the fonts installed on the computer are presented with only rudimentary grouping – for example, under Homerton there is medium and bold, with an oblique variant of each – and when lots of fonts are installed, the user normally sees them in applications as a very long menu.
Originally supplied by Fabis Computing, and subsequently taken over by iSV Products, who improved and updated it, EasyFont Pro was designed to address this issue. It is a font manager for RISC OS that allows you to individually switch fonts (or groups of fonts) on or off, controlling their availability for use in other applications: Only those which are enabled are visible to applications – and are therefore shown to the user in a font menu or dialogue. It can also scan files to determine which fonts are needed to display them, turning those fonts on as necessary.
In other words, it manages a large font collection in a much more useful way than the standard RISC OS font manager*.
With the release of version 5.18 of RISC OS, it seems some users have reported problems using EasyFont Pro on the IYONIX pc.
Dave Holden has now released an update to the 32-bit version, which addresses the issue and also includes other modifications to ensure the software works on the BeagleBoard.
Users of that version, namely 5.11 or better, are now able to download an upgrade to the latest version via the APDL website.
* To be fair to RISC OS, the Font Manager is really designed to manage fonts in terms of handling them internally, providing APIs to allow applications to make use of them, not in terms of organising them on behalf of the user. How applications present available fonts to the user was always down to the application developers, subject to guidelines provided in the RISC OS Style Guide.
