CacheFont v1.1 By Adam Dawes 25th September 1994 What Is CacheFont? ================== CacheFont is a little utility that makes accessing your fonts significantly quicker -- in fact, near instant. I was always annoyed when using any programs on my Amiga which involved fonts by the fact that when the program went to see what fonts were available, I was presented with a rather lengthy wait. I decided I'd finally had enough of this, and it was time to do something about it. So after much poring over my keyboard and flicking through Amiga Intern, I finally came up with a solution. This utility comes in two parts: CacheFont . . . . Installs or removes CacheFont (run it once to install the program, and a second time to remove it). MakeFontList . . This program must be run before CacheFont can be used. It creates the list of fonts that CacheFont will use later in order to avoid reading the whole font list again. CacheFont relies entirely on the files made by the MakeFontList utility. If your fonts directory is changed, CacheFont will *not* know anything about it unless you run MakeFontList afterwards. Even rebooting your machine won't change the list of fonts that CacheFont is aware of, so please run the MakeFontList utility every time you change your font directory. It takes only as long to run as a single font requester would've taken without CacheFont, and I think you'll agree that your font directory is changed much less often than you open a font requester! System Requirements =================== CacheFont will only work on an Amiga with OS2 or greater. You don't need a harddrive, vast quantities of memory, or anything else. Using CacheFont =============== CacheFont is installed simply by entering its command from the command line. It will print a message telling you that it has installed itself, and from then on all your font requesters will be running through the patch. If you wish to uninstall the patch, simply execute the command again and it will remove itself. The best way to install CacheFont is by including it in your startup-sequence or user-startup. This way, the patch will be initialised every time your system is booted. You do not need to 'run' the program as it returns control to your command line immediately. Using MakeFontList ================== MakeFontList must be run in order for the CacheFont to function. It scans your Fonts: directory and stores the information needed by CacheFont in a directory (which will be created if necessary) called Fonts:CacheFontData/. If CacheFont has any difficulty reading these data files, it will display a requester asking you to run MakeFontList, and continue by using the original (slow) unpatched routine. You will need to run MakeFontList every time you make a change to your Fonts: directory. Don't include this command in your startup-sequence though! Call it manually whenever you need to. And how much disk space is wasted by the caching information files? Well I have 55 fonts installed at the moment, and the cache files come out to a whopping great 1581 bytes, hardly a great sacrifice. :) Testing ======= CacheFont has been tested without any problems on the following utilities: AdPro 2.5 AmiQWK 2.5 Brilliance 2.0 CygnusEd Professional 3.5 DeluxePaint4 DeluxePaint4 AGA Devpac 3.02 DirectoryOpus 4.12 Filer 3.1 Final Writer Font Prefs V2.14 GoldEd 0.991 GP Fax 2.343 Infocom Task Force 1.55 MUI 2.2 NComm Nicola 1-06 PageStream 3.0 Personal Fonts Maker 1.2 PowerPacker 4.0a ProCalc 1.04 Q-Blue 1.0 ReqChange 2.01 Spot 1.3 SuperBase Pro4 1.01 Term 4.1 ToolManager 2.1 TurboText 1.03 Typesmith 2.02 Wordworth 3.0b Workbench 'Font' preferences program CacheFont has been tested and works on the following computers: A600 A1200 A1500 A3000 A4000/030 A4000/040 ..it should work on any other computers without any problems (see "requirements"). Legal stuff =========== Ok, so my associates and I have tested this program as extensively as we can, and haven't found any bugs in it yet, but sod's law clearly dictates that the experiences of the many are worse than the experiences of the few. I won't accept responsibility for any damage done to your system or data lost, directly or indirectly, as a result from using CacheFont or any of its associated files. You use the program entirely at your own risk. Of course if you *do* experience problems then I'll do what I can to sort them out, and please let me know so that I can try to cure them in a future version of CacheFont. CacheFont and its associated files are not public domain. They may be distributed freely as long as no unreasonable charge is imposed. It may not be included within any commercial package without express written permission from the author; the exceptions from this are the AmiNet CDs and Fred Fish's utility collections. CacheFont and its associated utilities may only be distributed if all files contained within the original archive are present. History ======= Version 1.0 (1/9/94) o Initial release. o Thanks to the following people for assistance in testing: Nick Doyle Jon Hudson Lars Janssen Roger Kille Mark Stacey Tim Still Nicholas Wynne Version 1.1 (25/9/94) o CacheFont now understands Tagged font lists. This should keep it working with most (if not *all*) of the programs that crashed version 1.0 (eg, FontPrefs by Martin Stengle). Note that CacheFont doesn't actually return the tags at the moment, it always returns a null pointer. Whilst this isn't entirely useful, it does stop crashes. My thanks to Bret McGee for helping my find and solve this bug (aswell as for some other very nice ideas which have yet to be implememted). o Version strings are now Commodore Style-Guide compliant (thanks to everyone who pointed that one out to me! :) Contacting the author ===================== Yes! Please do write to me if you like CacheFont or if you have any problems with it or suggestions for a new version. I can't promise to reply quickly if you write via snail-mail, but I will always reply to email messages. I can be contacted at: InterNet ad32@vms.bton.ac.uk FidoNet Adam Dawes@2:441/93.5 SnailMail Adam Dawes 47 Friar Road Brighton BN1 6NH England
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