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Guidelines for Using ATS for Fonts

There are a number of guidelines you should follow to assure optimal performance and efficient memory use when you use ATS for Fonts. This section summarizes them. The code in this chapter shows you how to apply most of the following guidelines:

• Restrict an iteration to the fonts or font families for which your application needs information. If you need to gather information about all the installed fonts, you should do so once and then cache the results because iterating over all fonts can degrade performance. See “Enumerating Font Families and Fonts” for more information.

• Implement the Fonts panel instead of the Font menu. Applications that run in Mac OS X should have a consistent user interface. The Fonts panel, formerly available only to Cocoa applications, is now available to Carbon applications in Mac OS X. To be consistent with Cocoa applications, Carbon applications should provide a Fonts panel. You should only provide a Font menu if your application runs in Mac OS 9. See “Providing a Fonts Panel in a Carbon Application” for more information.

• Set up notifications to keep informed of changes in the font database. This lets you avoid querying the generation seed in the font database to track changes. See “Setting Up Notifications” for more information.

• Avoid iterating through font tables if you can obtain the desired information by using a high-level function. For example, if you need to obtain a font name, use the function ATSFontFamilyGetQuickDrawName.

• Assess your application’s performance by running such tools as tops or ThreadViewer. These tools can help you to gauge how often your code triggers ATS server messaging and other behavior. You can use that information t to optimize your code.

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