> FastFontMenu is a System Extension (INIT) which speeds up the
> building of the Font Menu in most
> applications. It does this by sorting the font names in an internal
> array, rather than insertion
> sorting them in the menu the way the current MacOS does. This
> improved algorithm is scheduled to be included in a future version
> of the MacOS, but since that'll take longer to ship, I'm releasing
> it
> now as freeware. It's scheduled to expire with version 7.7 of the
> MacOS. If the fix isn't in the
> system at that point, I'll release a new version, but I'd really
> rather have this fixed by the OS
> than by me. I have no idea what the picture is going to look like
> for MacOS:The NeXT Generation, but
> hopefully this sort of kludge won't be needed.
>
> FastFontMenu 1.1 adds caching. This has two benefits. The first is
> that it'll be MUCH faster for
> every font menu after the first, as long as your fonts haven't
> changed (applications that have fonts
> in their resource forks will clobber the caching, but they've been
> warned about that by Apple's
> Developer Support for more than five years). The second benefit is
> that after the first time, the
> memory requirements of FFM are much smaller. If you were seeing
> problems in a control panel or desk accessory, you should no longer
> see them as long as you've run an application that builds a font
> menu first. Ideally, this first pass at the menu would be built at
> startup time, and that's
> something I'm looking at for 1.1.1.
>
> FastFontMenu is WorldScript savvy, and should give you a font menu
> that's sorted in the same order
> that you get without it installed. If you find that this isn't the
> case, drop me a note, and I'll
> look into it.
>
> For a small number of fonts, you'll see a relatively small
> improvement if you notice it at all, but
> for those people who have a bazillion fonts in their systems, the
> speed improvement in launching
> most applications is pretty darned significant. The only case I
> know of where FastFontMenu can slow
> things down is on systems which have mostly non-Roman fonts
> installed. The reason for this is that
> for non-Roman fonts, FastFontMenu doesn't do the smartest thing
> possible for the international
> string comparisons of the font names. This still hasn't been
> changed as of 1.1, but the caching
> means you only have to pay the penalty the first time the font menu
> is built (unless your fonts
> change).
DL #1: FastFontMenu v1.1
DL #2: FastFontMenu v1.1.1
DL #3: FastFontMenu v2.0.1. Compatible with Mac OS 8.6
DL #4: FastFontMenu v2.2. Compatible with Mac OS 9
