Home > Support > HOWTOs > HOW-TO Manage FontMachine
HOW-TO manage FontMachine
The HOW-TO Manage FontMachine describes installation and removal of FontMachine (for Psion and compatibles), listing currently installed fonts, and installation and removal of font files.
Installing FontMachine
As FontMachine interacts very closely with EPOC itself, installation is a bit trickier than with applications.
- Here comes the first tricky part. Close all your open applications. Your PDA will be soft reset at the end of the installation, you will lose data if you don't close all open applications.
- To start the installation, double click on the fontmachine.sis file on your PC in the usual way. You can also transfer fontmachine.sis to your PDA and install from there.
- While installing, you'll see the license. You must accept the license to install FontMachine.
Series 7: it can happen that installation from the PC hangs for no apparent reason, about three quarters of the transfer, with the message "Displaying dependencies". In this case, transfer the .sis file directly to your Series 7 and install it from there, by tapping twice on it.
- Here comes the second tricky part. At the end of the installation, you will see a dialog on your PDA that states that your "Your PDA must be restarted".
- When installing from a PC
- Wait until the installer is finished. This is when PsiWin/EPOC Install says "FontMachine is successfully installed" and you are asked to "Install another program" or to Finish".
- First press the "Finish" button on the PC.
- Then press the Escape key on your PDA.
- Your PDA will be reset, and you might hear a melody.
- When installing on the PDA itself:
- Press the Escape key as soon as you the dialog with the title "Your PDA must be restarted".
- Your PDA will be reset, and you might hear a melody.
Note: Pressing the keys Fn+Ctrl+Shift+K does not generate a soft reset. - Press on the Control panel button in the System screen. You will see that Fonts has been added.
Listing installed fonts
Tap twice on Fonts in the Control panel. You will a list of all installed fonts. The Bitmap fonts are the native EPOC fonts (these fonts live in .gdr files). The Scalable fonts are the fonts rendered by FontMachine.
Installing a font file
Installing a font file works almost the same as installing a .sis file. The biggest difference is that you will not see the progress bar, as font installation is a lot faster than program installation.
Note: you can even install and uninstall EPOC's own .gdr font files with Fonts.
- Press the Add new button. You will see the Add font file dialog, which acts like an Open file dialog (apart from the Format field, which we will ignore for now).
- Go to the Documents folder and add a font file. If you try to add a file not containing fonts, or fonts unknown to FontMachine, you will see an error message.
- If all your font files make Fonts complain, try a soft reset first.
- You can now choose to which disk the font file will be copied.
- If there is a file with the same name in the fonts directory on that disk, you are asked if you want to replace that file.
- If the installation is successful, you will see a message stating that the font is installed. Otherwise you will see an error message telling you what went wrong.
Removing a font file
Removing a font works by first choosing an installed font file and then removing or deleting that file.
- While in Fonts, press the Remove button.
You will see the Remove font(s) of this file dialog.
Note: font files are always stored in the \System\Fonts folder on a disk, therefore you cannot change the folder name.
- You can choose between removing and deleting font files:
- Press Remove to make EPOC forget the font(s) inside this file. The file stays in the fonts folder on the disk.
- Press Delete to also remove the font file from the disk.
- You will now need to confirm your choice.
- If something went wrong, you will see an error message.
- If nothing went wrong, you will see a message stating that the file was removed or deleted.
Uninstalling FontMachine
If you must uninstall FontMachine, first close all applications, and then uninstall FontMachine.
On some machines normal uninstallation does not work. If this happens to you, try removing FontMachine like this:
- Close all applications.
- Rename the Fonts folder in the System folder on the drive you have FontMachine installed on to aaaFonts.
- Perform a soft reset.
- Delete FontMachine.dll from the renamed aaaFonts folder.
- Rename aaaFonts back to Fonts.
- Perform a soft reset.
- Now uninstall FontMachine using Add/remove again.
After uninstalling FontMachine, or after removing a font file, the font name and the actual text that you have entered in your document are still available. The text will simply be shown using a built-in bit map font.
Note: If you have other programs that use the C library, it is possible that when you uninstall FontMachine, the C library is removed too. Contact mBrain Software if this happens to you.