In light of the recent discussion about next year's Mac's inability to boot into MacOS 9, one program which will definitely suffer here is Macromedia's venerable Fontographer. This wonderful program, which seems to have slipped completely off Macromedia's list of things-to-worry-about, is unlikely ever to be made MacOS X compliant, or updated in any other way for that matter, according to the pundits. Worse still, the current version refuses to work in any useful way in Classic. If you want to use Fontographer, you simply must be able to boot into MacOS 9.
Help is at hand. The solution not completely straightforward, and it does require dipping your arms up to the elbow in Unix, but tit works. The solution is an X-Window program called pfaedit, and is available from <http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net>. But there are a few things you have to do before you can use it. If you haven't already done so, you will have to install an X-Darwin client such as XFree86 or OroborOSX (check out VersionTracker for this stuff), then follow the instructions at the pfaedit site. There is a specific MacOS X build available, and the installation instructions are very clear. And it works! pfaedit does everything that Fontographer does, and more. The interface is a little clunky, being X-Window, but it supports all fonts supported by MacOS X, including Apple's own OpenType .dfont format. It's a bit of trouble to get there, but the trip is worth it. This is a great example of the way MacOS X is opening up a huge vista of alternative (and free!) software which has not only never been available to Mac users before, but which can start to replace a large amount of legacy software which we will have to leave behind as the move to MacOS X develops. -- Peter Hinchliffe Apwin Computer Services FileMaker Pro Solutions Developer Perth, :::::::::::::::::::::::: Western Australia Phone (618) 9332 6482 Fax (618) 9332 0913 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Mac because I prefer it -- Windows because I have to. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
