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Printer’s Apprentice review at Designi1.com

Thanks for the review, José!

Printer’s Apprentice 8.1 is slated for a mid-December 2009 release. If you are interested in participating in our beta program, please send an email to helpdesk@loseyourmind.com.

• Printer’s Apprentice 8.1 works great with Windows 7. There are many minor cosmetic enhancements in the application for better integration with both Windows 7 and Vista. For example, the toolbar will use Windows 7 icons and listboxes support hover highlight effects.
• Printer’s Apprentice now queries the system to determine the correct font used for drawing dialog boxes. This font is then used to render the various screens in Printer’s Apprentice. In most cases this is Segoe UI.

  

• New Menus & Colors tab on the Options dialog. On this screen you can change menu, toolbar & icon styles.  You can also change the color of the accent bars used across the top of  the main screen.

  

• Font Files and Font Groups tabs use a new tree control. This should eliminate the "object not set" errors that could pop up with the old control.  The new control is FolderView.Net, provided by LogicNP Software.

  

• The old control, exptreelib.dll & exptreelib.pdb, will be replaced with the new  logicnp.folderview.dll when you run the Printer’s Apprentice setup program.
• Added a "Make New Folder" button to the Copy / Move Font to Folder dialog box.
• Added a "Make New Group" button to the Copy / Move Font to Font Group dialog box.
• Fixed a bug with installing Type 1 fonts. If the registry key 
  SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Type 1 Installer\Type 1 Fonts did not exist, then the install would fail.
• Fixed a bug in the OpenType font reading routines. Some fonts were being ignored if they had invalid strings in the OTF NAME table.
• When installing multiple fonts, and one or more of them is already installed, a dialog box would popup showing you the number to be installed and the number already installed. This now uses a message box with Yes/No buttons instead of just OK.

Printer’s Apprentice is always available for you to try directly from our web site. And if you like the software, we hope that you will purchase a license. Use the link below and you can get Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for $20. This is a 20% discount off the regular price

Download Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for Vista & XP

Purchase Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for Vista & XP – 20% discount

This is a minor upgrade and includes the following changes:

• Updated web links to various pages at loseyourmind.com
• Improved startup splash screen.
• Various minor bug fixes.

A complete list of changes can be found in the Printer’s Apprentice  versionhistory.txt file on the web site.

Any comments or questions? You can send them directly to the developer behind the software via helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.

To take advantage of the discount, visit the link below on Wednesday, August 5, 2009.

Get Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for $11.95 One Day Only Wednesday, August 5, 2009 http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/printers-apprentice-80/

We are doing this through our partners at Bits Du Jour. Visit them everyday for discounted deals on great software.

Printer’s Apprentice is always available for you to try directly from our web site. And if you like the software, we hope that you will purchase a license! Use the link below and you can get Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for $20. This is a 20% discount off the regular price

Download Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for Vista & XP

Purchase Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 for Vista & XP – 20% discount

Here is a closer look at a few of the new features.

Speed! – Printer’s Apprentice now caches the information read from uninstalled TrueType, OpenType and Type 1 fonts. The data is stored in an xml file to make subsequent reads of the same fonts much faster. A past blog post examines the data storage structure and includes a performance table showing initial read versus subsequent reads.

Missing PFM / PFB Detection – One of the most frequent questions emailed to us is “Why can’t I view Type 1 fonts out of the Adobe Type Manager folder?” By default, ATM stores PFM and PFB files in separate folders. To view uninstalled Type 1 fonts, Printer’s Apprentice needs the PFM and PFB files in the same folder. Version 8.00.32 now displays this message box if missing files are detected in a folder.

Full Screen Toggle – Need to see more fonts? Use the full screen toggle button!

Sorting Arrows in Font Lists – Like Windows Explorer, Printer’s Apprentice now uses the built in sorting arrows in all the font lists throughout the application.

A complete list of changes can be found in the Printer’s Apprentice  versionhistory.txt file on the web site.

Any comments or questions? You can send them directly to the developer behind the software via helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.

The next  update will have a pair of “fit & polish” features. These are nothing too serious. And they certainly did not take long to implement. But they simply make the application better.

Full Screen Toggle – This button simply maximizes Printer’s Apprentice to fill the full screen. The top title bar is hidden and the Printer’s Apprentice window covers the Windows Taskbar. The hotkey to toggle full screen mode is F11. (Microsoft Office and FireFox also use F11 for full screen modes.)

This feature is great for when you really want to see your fonts blown up large. Or for when you are working with a client on font selection over a shared monitor.

Sorting Glyphs (Arrows) – Like Windows Explorer, Printer’s Apprentice now uses the built in sorting arrows in all the listviews throughout the application.

This should have been in the application a long time ago. However, the .NET listview control does not expose the arrow functionality directly. So the implementation uses Windows API calls. The code was not difficult at all. But it kept getting bumped down on the To Do list.

Most of the Windows 7 material is focused on UI and API changes. But occasionally we get an article related to fonts. Today, the Windows 7 team posted this article about the ClearType technology in Windows 7.

Engineering changes to ClearType in Windows 7

And back in February, there was a post about typography and text rendering in Windows 7.

Advances in typography and text rendering in Windows 7

Here is a non-Microsoft article that looks at the font management UI in Windows 7. It is from the I Started Something blog.

Improvements to fonts in Windows 7

It is great to see that Microsoft is not ignoring font in Windows 7. If you have come across any other Windows 7 font articles, feel free to forward them to helpdesk at lose your mind dot com and I will get the links posted.

The latest changes include

• Fixed a problem with Arial in pstaskdialog.dll. If Arial was missing,   PA would crash when a messagebox was displayed.
• Added a fix for a crash in the print engine. If the print job was deleted from  the spooler before PA was done creating the document, then PA would crash.
• Added a new message box warning about PFM and PFB files not being in the same folder.  This appears after reading a folder and one or more TrueType fonts don’t have matching  PFM & PFB files. This message box can be disabled after the first viewing.

  

• Speed improvements when reading fonts using the Font Files and Font  Groups tab. Information such as the font name, etc is now stored in a  fontcache.xml file. More details about this feature can be found in this blog post.

I’m particularly happy with the speed improvements and PFM / PFB checking. If you want to be part of the beta team, send a request to helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.

One bottleneck in the system is reading fonts with the Font Files and Font Groups tabs.

When PA displays a list of fonts, it does not just show the file name and size. It also has to show the proper font name. The font names are stored deep inside the TrueType file structure in a series of tables. So when listing the the fonts in a folder, PA opens each file, reads in the file name and other data, then close the file. If you have hundreds of files in a folder, this can take a few (annoying) moments.

To get around this delay, I’m implementing a very simple font cache mechanism. The cache is an XML file, stored in %appdata%\printer’s apprentice\fontcache.xml, with the following structure.

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<NewDataSet>
  <fontcache>
    <path>c:\fonts\ttfonts\a_c\tt0035m_.ttf</path>
    <size>47356</size>
    <fontfamily>Bodoni Bk BT</fontfamily>
    <fullfamilyname>Bodoni Book BT</fullfamilyname>
    <format>1</format>
    <outline>1</outline>
    <bold>0</bold>
    <italic>0</italic>
    <weight>400</weight>
  </fontcache>
</NewDataSet>

I’m still working with the code and .NET calls to see how I can compact the XML. But the basic idea is in place.

When Printer’s Apprentice reads a directory, it first checks the cache for a match on name and file size. If it finds a match, then the font data is right there. Otherwise we need to read the TTF/PFM/OTF data directly. Any new data is saved in the cache as well.

Here are some very preliminary benchmarks for reading in a few folders of TrueType and Postscript fonts. The “initial read” is the first time PA examines a folder of font file. Since it is they are not in the cache, each file is opened up and examined. The “cached read” is the time for subsequent reads of the folder. The files are all found in the cache and don’t need to be opened. The data is right there in the cache.

This is all still in the early stage of development. I’m still working with the storage format and benchmarking. But the work is moving forward. Stay tuned.

Comments? Questions? helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.

Bryan