building a font picker

[Howard Bornstein]

>1) Is there a way that's faster than this? If the user had lots of 
>fonts on their system, it would take a bit to grind through them all.

I set up a little test stack for this and used this script:

on mouseup
  put empty into fld "List"
  put the fontnames into fontlist
  put the ticks into t1
  lock screen
  repeat with i = 1 to number of lines in fontlist
    put line i of fontlist into fontName
    set the textFont of fld "F1" to fontName -- contains the letter "i"
    set the textFont of fld "F2" to fontName -- contains the letter "Z"
    put the formattedWidth of fld "F1" into fwd1
    put the formattedWidth of fld "F2" into fwd2
    if (fwd1 = fwd2) then put fontName &return after fld "List"
  end repeat

  put the ticks into t2
  put (t2-t1)/60&&"seconds"
end mouseup

On my system (iMac 500 Mz running OS 9.2.1 and Rev 2.01) it took .05 
seconds to generate a list of 18 monospaced fonts out of a font list of 
351 fonts. This is using my previous suggestion of comparing two letters 
rather than the entire alphabet.

The key to this speed, btw, is the lock screen command. You could 
probably get an additional significant increase on this by using the "for 
each" repeat structure. But it seems plenty fast even without this.

Regards,

Howard Bornstein
____________________
D E S I G N  E Q
www.designeq.com