Legacy Document
Important: The information in this document is obsolete and should not be used for new development.
Important: The information in this document is obsolete and should not be used for new development.
A Brief History of Font Resource Use
The use of font resources has evolved considerably since the early days of the Macintosh computer. Knowing how the changes have evolved can help you understand their use in current software.The earliest versions of Macintosh system software stored and created all font data in
'FONT'resources. Font families were created by storing a unique family ID in bits 7-14 of the resource ID of each font in the family. To name a font family, a designer included a'FONT'resource with a point size of zero. This method severely restricted the range of both family IDs and point sizes.With the introduction of the 128K ROM, there were two new resource types: the font family (
'FOND') resource, which stores size-independent information for a font family, and the bitmapped font ('NFNT') resource, which has the same internal format as the'FONT'resource, but can use any resource ID. Each font family resource names the family and contains a font association table, which consists of a number of individual font entries. Each entry contains a word for the font style, a word for the font size, and a word for the'FONT'resource ID or bitmapped font resource ID of the font. This new scheme expanded the range of both font sizes and font family IDs to allow values from 0 to 32,767.When TrueType outline font support was added for System 7, a new font resource type was added: the outline font resource, the internal format of which is substantially different from that of the bitmapped font resources.
- Note
- Because of the way that
'FONT'resources were originally constructed, a'FONT'resource can exist independently of a font family resource. This is not true of bitmapped font and outline font resources, each of which must be associated with a font family resource.