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Managing Fonts: QuickDraw Concepts

This chapter provides an overview of font management on the Macintosh and includes recent changes in how fonts are managed under Carbon. The information in this chapter will help you if you are designing a font or if your application uses different font families or allows the user to choose from a variety of fonts.

If you are new to font management on the Macintosh, you should read the entire chapter. If you are also new to handling text in Mac OS, you should first read “Introduction to Text on the Macintosh.” See

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/Text/Text-13.html

General font-related information and programming suggestions are found in the discussion of font handling in that chapter. You should also be familiar with QuickDraw. See

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/Text/Text-126.html

If you have already worked with the Font Manager and are familiar with fonts, you should read “Font Support in the Mac OS” and “How the Font Manager Tracks Changes to the Font Database.”

If you are writing a font editor, you also need to read the TrueType Font Format Specification, and the OpenType Font Format Specification. You can find links to these specifications, as well as additional information on TrueType Fonts, on the Apple typography website:

http://developer.apple.com/fonts/

This chapter begins with an overview of the terminology used to describe fonts and basic Font Manager concepts, including

• characters, character codes, and glyphs

• bitmapped and outline fonts

• font families, font names, and font IDs

• system and application font usage

• font measurements such as left-side bearing, advance width, base line, leading, and kerning

This chapter then describes

• how font resources are used to store fonts, including information on data–fork and resource–fork fonts

• font and font family references that replace the font ID

• how the Font Manager finds the information your application or QuickDraw requests

• how the Font Manger and QuickDraw work together to create or alter glyph bitmaps for displaying and printing

• how the Font Manager keeps track of changes to the font database

Contents:

Fonts
Font Support in the Mac OS
How the Font Manager Works

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