User Guide

This is where you can set the number of undo’s and
redo’s. You can have Fontographer remember up to 101
things to undo or redo! The penalty for this is, as usual,
memory: the more undo’s you request, the more memory
Fontographer will wind up using. Unlike other programs,
Fontographer has to remember undo’s for each separate
character. While that allows you to go back to any
character you have edited, open up that character’s outline
window, and have all your undo’s ready and waiting, it does
eat up some memory. Unless you simply don’t care about
memory requirements (maybe you have virtual memory or
lots of RAM), we recommend setting this preference
between 10 and 20, depending upon how often you like to
undo (and how far back you like to go).
The other two items in the undo area have to do with
memory considerations. When Fontographer runs out of
memory, it can throw away undo’s to free up some
memory. For instance, if you have been running
Fontographer for a couple of hours, edited fifty characters
with an average of ten edits per character, you have 50 x
10 = 500 undo’s floating around. If you let Fontographer get
rid of these when it runs out of memory, you can sometimes
reclaim a fair amount of memory. In addition to the “Throw
away undo’s when out of memory” item, there is an “Ask
before throwing away undo’s” checkbox. This is useful so
you will know when Fontographer is running low on
memory; an alert box will appear, asking if you want
Fontographer to throw away the undo’s.
Using the keyboard to choose a character
This area has to do with typing in things from the Font
Window. When you are looking at the Font Window and
you type a key from the keyboard, Fontographer has to
automatically choose the cell in the Font Window that
corresponds to that key click. However, there are a couple
of choices to be made to decide which character should be
highlighted. Basically, Fontographer can either choose the
character which corresponds to the font’s encoding vector,
Fontographer User's Manual
10: Expert Advice Page #2