Font-installer & standalone-installer problems

[Kresten Bjerg]

Hi
In march 2005 ( over 4 weeks)  the list hosted a long discussion on the question of font-installation, occasioned by my posting:
I will quote bits and pieces in the following.
 Our project is now approaching publication (a freeware standalone for an electronic diary,
organized to combine text with "glyphs" in 12 glyph-fonts).
Now we need  some kind of installer(s) for the mac,windows & linux standalones.
 If we cant find a freeware, we will pay the $ 20 for an InstallGadget from Sweat Technologies. But it cant handle the font installation. 
So there, we are  back in the midst of the old discussion. Now, we are  not especially  hooked on the idea of their being "included in the standalone"
..and "automatically installed". I would prefer the fontsuite(s) to be included in the same (self-decompressing)  folder(s) as the standalone(s), 
and a polite dialogue opening, asking the user to okay, that these (now 12) fonts are placed in  the font-folder,-  and only open the target stack, 
when this job is performed. Can this be engineered ? Perhaps with the help of a special install-stack ?
Maybe this redefinition of the problem avoids some of the subtle questions of the march discussion,
 - but I think we need help to settle on the two (3?) stack scripts for dialogues, in Mac and in Windows, which will achieve such installations
. ( And what about the linux standalone ?)

On 3/3/05 9:28 AM, "Kresten Bjerg" <kresten.bjerg at psy.ku.dk> wrote:

> I have a font suite of 14 specially devellopped fonts, needed for a
> standalone. Do users have to download them, and install them manually (a
> mac version and a Windows version) or can they somehow be included in
> the standalone, - and perhaps more or less automatically be installed
> from there?

You can't "embed" fonts into your standalone (like Flash or Director), but
you can store them in your standalone as custom properties and write them
out to disk into the OS's Fonts folder. This would be the equivalent of
being installed.

Ken Ray

There follows a long series of postings from Mark Talluto, Klaus Major, Mark Wieder, Jerry Bolzano et al ---

Ken Ray, march 30, 2005:
I'm sorry I didn't catch this earlier; the thread started by someone
(Kresten Bjerg) who was looking for a way to install fonts on Mac and
Windows, and when Klaus Major brought up the idea of using the 'ext.dll'
he'd mentioned:

> I don't have the syntax/docs anymore (yes, i paid for them  along time
> ago) but maybe this still works and even with XP?

Additionally, any external that ends in ".dll" is WIndows only; externals
for Mac usually end in ".bundle".

Soooooo, if you want to try loading fonts on Windows, use ext_loadFont with
a windows path (like "C:/Documents and Settings/All
Users/Desktop/KillerStumps.ttf"). As to loading fonts on OS X, I would
assume you can just copy the file to the proper Fonts directory.
-----
Jerry Balzano:
Certainly, on Macs I know I can copy the file to the Fonts folder, but 
then one generally needs to relaunch the application to gain access to 
the font.  I was just looking for a more userly-transparent way to 
provide * possibly only temporary * access to a font that I am really 
attached to using but which I can't assume will be present on host 
computers.  The other downside to copying files to people's Fonts 
folders is that it seems a tad intrusive,
----
Frank D. Engel:
but try this:
Inside the "Contents" folder of the application (standalone) bundle, 
there should be a "Resources" folder; if not, create one.

Inside that "Resources" folder, create a folder called "Fonts", and 
place the font(s) in that folder.
See if that works. 
-----
Also an "embedd/install fonts" thread by Bob Earp & Chipp Walters  in July seems relevant.
----
And I got a note, that maybe Scott Rossi from Tactile Media had a solution to fontinstallation
-----
I am not able to understand and  construct , what we need- and dont need ! - , out of all this information.

Will be grateful for advice and directions.

Kresten Bjerg

PS: A preliminary version of our stack can be found   in revonline userspaces 
http:// revonline.runrev.com/channels/home.rvc.gz   under the name  "Kresten".

Further info on the project ( and the mac and windows versions of the fonts) can be found at
www.psy.ku.dk/bjerg/diary.htm