[net.micro.mac] Setting the Application Font

jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) (03/23/85)

When the Macintosh first came out, I remember reading that one of the
explicitly-mentioned examples of the advantages of Resources was supposedly
that you could set the application font to be whatever you want.  Now that
the Resource Editor has finally appeared, can this be done?  If so, how?  I
would much prefer "New York" as the application font (and in fact it's my
understanding that it WAS the application font until shortly before the
system was released), since it is considerably more aesthetically pleasing
than the present one.
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Full-Name:  J. Eric Roskos
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darin@tmq.UUCP (Darin Adler) (03/28/85)

> When the Macintosh first came out, I remember reading that one of the
> explicitly-mentioned examples of the advantages of Resources was supposedly
> that you could set the application font to be whatever you want.  Now that
> the Resource Editor has finally appeared, can this be done?  If so, how?  I
> would much prefer "New York" as the application font (and in fact it's my
> understanding that it WAS the application font until shortly before the
> system was released), since it is considerably more aesthetically pleasing
> than the present one.

It is interesting that you mention this.  One of the values in the Macintosh
non-volatile RAM (along with what you set with the Control Panel) is the value
of the current application font.  The Mac ROM automatically sets this to 2,
which is the font number of New York.  However, after the first revision of
the System (which came with my Mac), patches were added to the System file, so
that the value in RAM represented the number of the application font  - 1 .
The lowdown on all this is that if you can set the value to 1 instead of 2, you
will have a Mac that uses New York as it's system font (I think).  If you are
a programmer, try something like this:

	{ Pascal Example, can be rewritten for ML or C }
	PROCEDURE SetApplFont(fontDesired: Integer);

	  VAR
	      error: OSErr;

	BEGIN
	GetSysPPtr^.font := fontDesired -1;
	error := WriteParam;
	END;

Check pp. 4-5 and 17-19 of the OS Utilities section of Inside Macintosh for
details.  If enough folks want it, it should be trivial to write a program that
does the necessary details for anyone who does not program the Mac.

Darin Adler
ihnp4!tmq!darin