Before ResEdit: Alert/Dialog, Font, and Icon Editors (1984)

[gingerbeardman]

I took a look and also can't figure out how to create a new font from the blank starting window.

 

[Mark Simonson]

It's weird, isn't it? It seems like you should be able to use More Ascent and More Descent multiple times to get some height (assuming it starts at zero ascent and descent), and then use Insert Character to add the first character, and then, once you've got that character in view (by clicking on the right side until its ASCII code is at the bottom), use Insert Column a few times to give it some width and then start adding pixels. But it just keeps incrementing the character code and nothing else. Or, get to a character and try and insert that character, and it just crashes.

It makes me think that there is a file you're supposed to start from, like an empty bitmap or something, that you prepare first in some way. And maybe that's why it beeps when the windows appear after you provide a font name when you launch the app.

Wait: I just discovered something. When it asks for the name of a font when you launch the app, it wants you to provide the name of an existing font document and the size of the font in that document. If you do this, it opens the font document dutifully with no beeps.

Maybe it's not possible to make a font from scratch, that you are meant to always start from an existing font. That raises a chicken and egg question, but the developers of the Mac must have had a way to make a font prior to the existence of Font Editor. So maybe they leveraged these earlier fonts to make the later ones. In other words, it could only make a new font from an existing one. The fact that there is no New Font... command is evidence for this.

 

[Mark Simonson]

Further speculation...

I think a font document may be a font data format that was used early in the Mac's development. In Andy Hertzfeld's story about developing the Font Manager (see here: https://www.folklore.org/Font_Manager.html?sort=date), he mentions that in the early days, fonts were just normal data files, not resources. Perhaps these data file fonts were made with an earlier version of Font Editor (it says in the window "Font Editor 2.0"), and that maybe this version of the app was used partly to convert these older font files into FONT resources. It would explain why it expects you to provide the name of a font document when you first launch the app.

 

[Mark Simonson]

I cleaned up some of the font files on the 800K disk images in this updated .zip archive of the Font Editor Disks.

 

[slomacuser]

Thanks for this @Mark Simonson and congrats on your great work. We are using your font Proxima Nova for our products

 

[Mark Simonson]

Awesome.

 

[Mark Simonson]

I've made new disk images and revised the user guide after learning more about how Font Editor works.

Basically, it's not possible to make a new font from scratch. You can only edit or modify existing fonts. I believe the Mac devs had some other earlier method or tool for creating fonts from scratch. When you launch the app, it expects you to enter the name of an existing font document from the disk. If you don't, it will beep and display a blank document that you can't do anything with.

Further, the "font documents" that Font Editor can read and write (which are plain data documents, not resources) were probably an earlier font format that QuickDraw used prior to Andy Hertzfeld's idea of storing them as FONT resources (see folklore.org). Font Editor was probably used to convert this older format into FONT resources and perhaps to create new fonts starting from existing ones (which is the only way you can make new fonts with it).

The new disk images and user guide have taken this new knowledge into account.

 

[cheesestraws]

That's a nice writeup.

 

[Mark Simonson]

Thanks! I hope to have a video demo up on YouTube soon.

 

[Mark Simonson]

Here's the video demo of Font Editor 2.0:

 

[slomacuser]

Very detailed video nice work

 

[Mark Simonson]

Thanks! It was fun to put together.

 

[pl212]

Thanks @Mark Simonson! I came across an article written in November 1984 (published in the Spring 1985 BMUG Newsletter) by Fred Huxham, that delves into the same FontEdit tool. Attached here in case it is of interest...

 

[Mark Simonson]

Wow—thanks for that. It's interesting the differences in his recipes and recommendations compared to what I came up with. A lot of this is due to the state of developer tools at the time it was written (November 1984). I do recall there was some kind of documentation for it from Apple, and that it also involved using RMover rather than ResEdit, which was probably still in a primitive state at the time.

I'm glad I took the time to do my own reverse engineering since it lead me to provide a more comprehensive guide.