From: John T. Chapman <jtc1@cornell.edu>
Subject: re: cleaning up my font menu
X-Xxdate: Fri, 16 Oct 92 14: 48:31 GMT
Nntp-Posting-User: jtc1@cornell.edu
Organization: Office of Computing and Statistical Consulting
X-Useragent: Nuntius v1.1.1d12
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 13:38:40 GMT

In article <1992Oct15.160800.7656@news.cs.brandeis.edu> Sod the proles!,
tabron@binah.cc.brandeis.edu writes:
>is suitcase II pay- or share-ware? is it available at sumex, etc.? (I may
>want/need to give it a try.) just for my info, what are the benefits of
>being able to store your fonts outside of your system folder? (the only
>benefit I can think of right now is that it would enable me to seriously
>shrink my *%^&*&%%$! 12 mg system folder.)

Suitcase (now 2.1.1) is commercial; check with Fifth Generation, Inc. (or 
your nearest friendly Mac mail-order house).

The biggest advantage Suitcase brings you is the ability to 
enable/disable fonts, sounds, fkeys and Apple Menu items (DAs for 
pre-Sys7); version 2.0 adds the ability to organize these by named sets.

This means that if you, like I, have a ton of fonts, you don't need to 
overload your System and can keep only the ones you need for the current 
projects installed. For example, I have (or at least have looked at)
a number of 'fancy' fonts or special purpose fonts (eg. a Klingon font) 
that I almost never during day-to-day writing. These would take up 
relatively large amounts of memory were I to keep them installed in the 
System all the time (not to mention making my Fonts menu a mile long). 
Suitcase lets me more or less switch them on or off as needed. (NOTE: 
Some applications don't like you playing around with fonts while they're 
running. This is fortunately well covered in the documentation.)

>I believe I've seen mention of a program that would enable me to create
>hierarchical menus. This would maybe help with my overloaded font menu,
>because I could create families of fonts and be able to access only one
>group at a time rather than looking at all 100+ fonts every time I choose
>a font (at least that's what I'm hoping? given my luck, such an
arrangement
>would probably screw up some Important MS Word 5 Function.) Someone out
there
>please tell me if my assumption is right and if so, what are the
programs that
>would enable me to create hierarchical menus and where can I find them?

Suitcase isn't exactly the tool that you're looking for, but may help out 
some in the overloaded fonts menu. In fact, I'm not sure there's anything 
that does quite what you want. Adobe Type Reunion and Dubl-Click's Menu 
Fonts do give you hierarchical menus, but they do this by grouping 
together fonts of the same PostScript family. (Thus, all Times are 
grouped, eliminating the BI Times Bold Italic, etc.). I don't think it's 
possible (or at least, easy) to define your own families. I haven't 
played around with either of these tools, though, so someone else will 
have to take this from here.

Good luck!

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  John T. Chapman                                     jtc1@cornell.edu
  Office of Computing and Statistical Consulting
  Cornell University - College of Human Ecology
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