If you use downloadable fonts, here’s a new utility you’ll love.
You probably know that downloaded fonts take longer to print than Times, Helvetica, and the others that are built in to your printer’s ROM. You might also know that you can save time by manually downloading those fonts. You also know that it’s a pain to do it, since you have to run a special program and then search out the desired fonts before you can send them to the printer.
Startup Downloader (STD) is a new shareware Control Panel that can automate this process for you. It allows you to create sets of fonts to download. Even more, each set is a small program which, when run, will download its fonts for you. Simply double-click on the set, and the fonts in it will go to your printer, where they will stay until you reset the printer. If you’re running System 7, it will work in the background, meaning you’re not wasting time.
I did some tests to check STD’s efficiency. I set up a document which contained the six standard faces in the Adobe Garamond set. This document took 1:41 minutes to print on my LaserWriter IINT. Next, I created a Startup Downloader set containing the same fonts. It took a minute and a half to download this set—just a few seconds less that it took to print the original document. This suggested to me that the majority of the time taken to process the document was devoted to downloading the fonts. Sure enough, when I printed the document a second time, it took about 20 seconds.
Normally, your printer flushes fonts from its memory after every print job, causing subsequent prints to take the same amount of time as the initial print. However, if a font is manually downloaded, it will stay in the printer’s memory until it is reset. Thus, each subsequent print job will be faster, since the font is already in memory.
Of course, the times will vary according to the number (and, presumably, the complexity) of the fonts involved, as well as the length of your document. Nevertheless, the time savings can be significant. If you regularly use the same downloadable fonts, you might want to consider putting them in your Startup Items folder, so they’ll automatically be sent to your printer every time you turn your Mac on.
As always, please remember to send in your shareware fee.
The article above is reprinted from Mac Monitor, the newsletter of The Savannah Macintosh Users Group. It may be reprinted in a single issue of newsletters published by non-profit user groups. Payment shall consist of a single issue of the newsletter in which the article appears, sent to the following address:
