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- Font Insight is designed to help all
Macintosh users quickly and easily find the character they are looking
for, format that character, and Copy/Paste that character into another
application.
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- In addition with Font Insight you
can create font sample sheets, create font catalogs, view encodings
for characters, find HTML entity tag and values for characters, search
for characters in 10 different ways, and even view the Morse Code for
characters.
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- Font Insight is not intended to
compete with the powerful font management and cataloging tools
available on the Macintosh. It’s designed to be a handy tool for the
rest of us!
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- DonationWare is very similar to
shareware. If you decide to continue using Font Insight you are asked
to pay $9.95, however with DonationWare 100% of the net proceeds from
that fee or donated to the charities of the author’s choice. In the case
of Font Insight, net proceeds are donated to the American Red Cross and a local theatre fund for the
advancement of the arts.
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- For $9.95 you get a great Mac OS X
utility while helping worthwhile non-profit organizations change the
world. It doesn’t get much better than that!
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- The first tab in Font Insight,
labeled Characters, provides you access to the 256 characters found in
MacRoman fonts. From the Characters tab you can quickly and easily
find the character you are looking for in the font you need. You can
then copy that character from Font Insight and paste that character
wherever you choose.
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- From the Characters tab you can
format the character by changing the font, size, color, bold, italic
or underline. You can choose to view the character on the grid or
target. You can Copy and Paste, and even Find the character you need
by entering different encoding methods.
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- The second tab in Font Insight,
labeled Encodings, provides you access to the 256 characters found in
MacRoman fonts. From the Encodings tab you can quickly and easily find
different encoding values for the selected character.
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- Characters within a font can be
referenced in several different ways, and with several different
numbering systems. FontInsight allows you to quickly and easily see
the common encoding values for MacRoman characters. Font Insight does
not support viewing MacJapanese or some of the less common Macintosh
encoding formats. See the Frequently Asked Questions section for more
information.
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- The MacRoman character set is used
for at least the following Mac OS localizations: United States,
British, Canadian French, French, Swiss, French, German, Swiss German,
Italian, Swiss Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish,
Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Brazilian, and the default International
system.
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- Unicode will ultimately replace
MacRoman, however the MacRoman character set is still the predominant
character set used by Macintosh applications. The modern version uses
8 bits for each character and has a total of 256 characters.
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- Our standard numbering system is
called The Decimal System. The word Decimal comes from the Latin root
dec meaning ten. We use the ten digits 0-9 and calculate in factors of
10. This numbering system seems natural to us but in reality it is
arbitrarily based on the fact that humans have ten fingers.
- Most fonts store 256 characters that
are internally numbered 0 to 255 in Decimal.
- Hexadecimal, often shortened to Hex,
describes a base-16 numbering system. That is, it describes a
numbering system containing 16 sequential numbers as base units,
including 0, which calculates in factors of 16. If humans had 16
fingers Hex would have been our natural numbering system. The
hexadecimal numbers are 0-9 and then the letters A-F.
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- Hexadecimal is a convenient way to
express binary numbers in modern computers in which a byte is almost
always defined as containing eight binary digits. One hexadecimal
digit can represent the arrangement of four binary digits. Two
hexadecimal digits can represent eight binary digits, or a byte. Most
fonts store 256 characters that are internally numbered 0 to FF in
Hex.
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- Octal is a term that describes a
base-8 number system. An octal number system consists of eight
single-digit numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. The number after 7
is 10. The number after 17 is 20 and so forth. In computer
programming, the octal equivalent of a binary number is sometimes used
to represent it because it is shorter. Most fonts store 256 characters
that are internally numbered 0 to 377 in Octal.
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- Binary describes a numbering scheme
in which there are only two possible values for each digit: 0 and 1.
The term also refers to any digital encoding/decoding system in which
there are exactly two possible states.
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- Binary numbers look strange when
they are written out directly. This is because the digits' weight
increases by powers of 2, rather than by powers of 10. In a digital
numeral, the digit furthest to the right is the "ones" digit; the next
digit to the left is the "twos" digit; next comes the "fours" digit,
then the "eights" digit, then the "16s" digit, then the "32s" digit,
and so on. The decimal equivalent of a binary number can be found by
summing all the digits. For example, the binary 10101 is equivalent to
the decimal 1 + 4 + 16 = 21.
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- Most fonts store 256 characters that
are internally numbered 00000000 to 11111111 in Binary.
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- The Unicode character set is a
16-bit character set, capable of representing 65,536 different
characters, which is sufficient to represent the writing schemes of
all of the world's major languages. Most characters found in Macintosh
fonts exist somewhere in Unicode, however only a handful of true
Unicode fonts (a font designed to include many of the writing scripts
of the world) are in existence. Font Insight only displays the
MacRoman characters found within a Unicode font.
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- The Unicode Range is the range
within the Unicode encoding where the character is found. Most
MacRoman characters are found within the Basic Latin Unicode range.
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- The ANSI set of 217 characters, also
known as Windows-1252, was the standard for the core fonts supplied
with US versions of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office up to and
including Windows Me. Windows Latin 1252 is the most common character
set in use today on any platform.
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- Some characters have a special
meaning in HTML, like the less than sign (<) that defines the start of
an HTML tag. For the web browser to actually display these characters
we must insert character entities in the HTML source. A character
entity has three parts: an ampersand (&), an entity name, and finally
a semicolon (;).
- The advantage of using an HTML
Entity Name instead of an HTML Entity Value or HTML Entity Number is
that a name is easier to remember. The disadvantage is that not all
browsers support the newest HTML Entity Names, while almost all
browsers support HTML Entity Values.
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- Some characters have a special
meaning in HTML, like the less than sign (<) that defines the start of
an HTML tag. For the web browser to actually display these characters
we must insert character entities in the HTML source. A character
entity has three parts: an ampersand (&), an entity value, and finally
a semicolon (;).
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- HTML Entity Values are also referred
to HTML Entity Numbers.
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- Morse Code is an encoding in which
each letter is represented by a pattern of dots and/or dashes,
developed by Samuel Morse in the 1800s. The signals are relayed by
sound, light beams, or electric pulses. A dot is a signal of short
duration, and a dash is a signal of longer duration. Morse Code was
used to send telegraph messages before the invention of the telephone
and has been used in many other ways, such as emergency and wartime
communications. Morse Code is included in Font Insight for fun!
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- The Unicode Name of the character.
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- The third tab in Font Insight,
labeled Catalog, provides you an overview of the fonts currently
installed on your computer. You can print the Catalog for offline
reference.
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- The fourth tab in Font Insight,
labeled Sample, allows you to customize, create and print a sample
sheet that contains for the currently selected font.
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- Why does Font Insight not support
Unicode Fonts?
- Mac OS X is natively a Unicode
operating system, however there are very few true Unicode fonts in the
world and very few of those are sold to Macintosh users. Of the 500+
fonts that I’ve amassed over the past 12 years only 23 include
characters outside of the MacRoman character set. And most of these 23
are only usable by non-English speaking users outside of the United
Sates. Moreover, advanced users that need to view the entire Unicode
character set already have great professional strength tools at their
disposal. For these reasons it was not cost effective to implement
full Unicode support at this time. Font Insight is
for the rest of
us!
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- Where can I get Font Insight
Support?
