FONT.viewer

Author/Developer: Josh Chunick

This little project came about from my search for a specific set of about 20 fonts I had just installed called pixel fonts. Wouldn't you know, I couldn't remember which ones they were from the 260 fonts listed simply by name in the dropdown list of Director's Text Inspector. I'm a bit of a font freak, probably owing to the fact that I started my computer career as a graphic designer so normally I would have about 500-700 fonts installed. This, as you can imagine, makes it difficult to manage fonts, especially when you're looking for a specific look and only have the name to go by. So, I set out to create a utility for Director which functioned similar to Photoshop's font list in that it would display the font as it was intended.

This Director authoring utility satisfies one simple purpose: it allows a developer to easily access his/her installed fonts and shows him a sample of what it will look like when set in a text member. A few useful features were added:

• the ability to toggle antialiasing and kerning
• the ability to set a custom example text
• the ability to set a custom font size list
• a link explaining what a pangram is for the incurably curious (which all developers should be)

The most subtle, yet useful feature has to be the search function built into the list. Someone scrolling through the font list and clicking on a font may never come across the power programmed into the list. Tucked away under the hood, just waiting to be taken advantage of are the key commands:

• Up/Down arrow keys will scroll the font list one font at a time.
• Page Up/Page Down keys will scroll the font list by the number of visible lines.
• Home/End keys will scroll the list to the first and last entries in the font list.
• Typing a single letter or several letters of a font name will cause the selection to jump through the list to the first occurrence of that letter combination.

Versions Supported: DMX2004 and lower. Note that D11 and above do not support a font member's fontList() method anymore.

Download: Font Style Viewer (zip) (28KB)

Screenshot: