Inside Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: Font Book 3, Emoji support
Apple has enhanced its Font Book app for managing installed font faces, and has added a new Emoji font commonly used in chat to express ideograms.
Font Book 3.0 now provides more flexible displays of the character glyphs supplied by a particular font face, with the standard alphabetical list augmented with a display of every glyph used in the font, and an information panel that lists its full metadata.
The information panel (below) presents every supported language, the version, its installed location, a description of the font, its copyright and trademark data, the number of glyphs supplied, whether it is embeddable, enabled, copy protected or installed as a duplicate.
Duplicate font files are flagged with a warning icon, and can be fixed automatically or resolved manually from a comparison drop down sheet (below).
The new Apple Color Emoji font supplies 502 glyphs in a TrueType font. Apple previously added emoticon support in iOS within Japanese input, which replaced typed characters with suggested faces created from Roman characters. The new move in Lion suggests company is likely to add actual Emoji input to the iOS as well.
Font Book 3.0 now provides more flexible displays of the character glyphs supplied by a particular font face, with the standard alphabetical list augmented with a display of every glyph used in the font, and an information panel that lists its full metadata.
The information panel (below) presents every supported language, the version, its installed location, a description of the font, its copyright and trademark data, the number of glyphs supplied, whether it is embeddable, enabled, copy protected or installed as a duplicate.
Duplicate font files are flagged with a warning icon, and can be fixed automatically or resolved manually from a comparison drop down sheet (below).
The new Apple Color Emoji font supplies 502 glyphs in a TrueType font. Apple previously added emoticon support in iOS within Japanese input, which replaced typed characters with suggested faces created from Roman characters. The new move in Lion suggests company is likely to add actual Emoji input to the iOS as well.
Comments
The new move in Lion suggests company is likely to add actual Emoji input to the iOS as well.
Who writes this stuff? Let's all just jump to conclusions so.
Who writes this stuff? Let's all just jump to conclusions so.
I don't get what's wrong with what was written.
Not mad about emoji, but I'm glad those that are are getting it I suppose. Not sure it's so outrageous a conclusion to jump to that it will get iOS support...it has made an appearance in the past after all.
Does this manage all the fonts in MS Office?
If not, then, whatever.
Does this manage all the fonts in Adobe CS?
Does this manage all the fonts in MS Office?
If not, then, whatever.
What do you mean? Anything you add to Font Book is accessible through CS...
I never have any pity for anyone choosing to use Office on a mac. Pages blew Office into my bin long ago
Nice to see it come to Mac OS X tho
Apple has enhanced its Font Book app for managing installed font faces, ...
Any improvement is good but IMO this seems only slightly less underwhelming than the current font management system. Apple has never been very creative nor seemingly interested in spending much time on these sorts of details of the OS it seems.
Given that all this stuff is supposed to be under NDA, that it's a Sunday (traditionally a day where we are lucky to get a single story from Apple Insider), and that they've already posted copious details on every other aspect of Lion, perhaps this one could have been left on the cutting room floor, as it were?
Interestingly, the UI of the new Font Book doesn't match the new Lion UI. See how the four toolbar buttons are buttons instead of a slider?
Font Book probably still has yet to be fully optimized under Lion. It will probably be addressed by the next build. If not, file a bug report with Apple.
I'm confused on some comments... Emoji has always been on iOS...
Nice to see it come to Mac OS X tho
Apple has been weird with Emoji on iOS. It wasn't there originally, but then was added. However, it was only enabled for input in certain areas (not the USA). There are easy ways to enable input on your US iOS device, and once you do that, you can send messages with Emojis and other iOS users will see them even if they didn't enable Emoji input.
It used to be fun to send Emojis and have people not know how you did it, but that's kind of worn off.
Who writes this stuff? Let's all just jump to conclusions so.
massive in the japanese market, which is a massive market. need we say more?
I didn't even know TrueType could handle colour fonts.
Any improvement is good but IMO this seems only slightly less underwhelming than the current font management system. Apple has never been very creative nor seemingly interested in spending much time on these sorts of details of the OS it seems.
Given that all this stuff is supposed to be under NDA, that it's a Sunday (traditionally a day where we are lucky to get a single story from Apple Insider), and that they've already posted copious details on every other aspect of Lion, perhaps this one could have been left on the cutting room floor, as it were?
I'm not sure what more font management you want from OSX? Windows doesn't even have a font book.
How does Font Book compare with products such as Extensis Suitcase?
Well, it depends on what you need. If you run a marketing firm would you use address book to manage your mailing lists? Obvioisly not. Likewise, if you are a professional graphic designer (which my wife is), font book will not cut it. One of the surest ways to hose your book design business is by messing up your fonts...and if you're a professional, you have lots and lots of fonts--including some older ones which you must hold onto for various reasons.
Font Book has never shown me that it can handle that job. So unless and until font book becomes professional grade software (not likely), you get something that can handle the job. I've used one 3rd party font manager or another since the 1980s. During the osx switch, I went from suitcase to fontagent pro and I have no complaints at all.
I'm not sure what more font management you want from OSX? Windows doesn't even have a font book.
True, but then again, most people don't manage their fonts all that much. And in Windows, the Fonts folder is more than just a typical folder. It has previews, the ability to quickly install/uninstall fonts. It's not Font Book but it's still more than adequate for most people.
I don't have any issues with Font Book, but I do agree that it could be more robust in some ways.