Apple Type Services for Fonts Programming Guide

Apple Type Services for Fonts Programming Guide provides an overview of font management in Mac OS X, describes the concepts needed to understand font management, and shows you how to perform the most common font management tasks. The Apple Type Services for Fonts programming interface is a collection of functions and data types that you can use to access and manage font data. It is designed to handle all the font formats and associated data models supported in Mac OS X. The programming interface is designed with performance, scalability, and consistency in mind, and is available to Cocoa and Carbon applications through the Apple Type Services (ATS) framework in Mac OS X.

Apple Type Services for Fonts offers better stability and enhanced performance than previous versions, and features the following improvements:

• Error checking and exception handling are improved.

• More information is cached to disk, speeding up login and logout times.

• Font data is retrieved faster.

• Memory allocation is more efficient.

• Corrupt or invalid font files are disabled automatically.

• Better font streaming supports PDF embedding and downloading fonts to a printer.

Who Should Read This Document

You should read this document if you plan to write a Mac OS X application that

• activates or deactivates fonts

• needs to keep track of fonts available in the ATS font database

• provides font utility services to other applications

• supports the Fonts panel user interface

• plans to store persistent font information in a document

• uses basic font metrics

Organization of This Document

This document is organized into the following chapters:

• Managing Fonts: ATS Concepts, details the fonts services available in Mac OS X, defines font terminology, provides information on where fonts are installed, gives an overview of the ATS server, and describes the user interface for fonts.

• Managing Fonts: ATS Tasks, shows how to accomplish the most common programming tasks using ATS for Fonts and provides guidelines for increasing performance and making efficient use of memory in your application.