Hello, Everyone,
At BriTon Leap, we have some fun every four years with Leap Year Day. It’s just a play on words, but something we can all have fun with. This year, we have a few ‘leaplings’ for you to check out.
Embrilliance Platform:
- Several MacOS – Sonoma workarounds have been added, because, well… …Mac.
- We’ve added the option to print the Brother / Baby Lock ‘snowman’ target when you print templates.
- The Utility menu item to Send to Brother / Baby Lock by WiFi is renamed by request, so it doesn’t appear machine-specific.
- Single-line lettering property page now has word spacing slider.
- Minor bug-fixes for individual systems.
Enthusiast:
- When using some of the Utility features like Carousel and Mirror x 4, the page now zooms as you adjust the live sizes/distances.
AlphaTricks:
AlphaTricks is getting a major update. This is FREE for current owners, but there will be a price increase coming very soon. If you like embroidery fonts and have been waiting to buy, now’s the time. This was lovingly made for all of you who have bought AlphaTricks to organize your fonts. It wasn’t great at the task before, but now it is designed around it.
- Font Library handles organizing, filtering, tagging, managing, and discovering fonts within large collections.
- Font Cache loads systems of thousands of fonts in reduced time, even half or less.
Font Library
Font Library is easy to operate. Simply create a lettering design and look at the properties. There’s a new button replacing the old Info or ‘?’ button to the right of the font name.
When you click this, the Font Library Window shows. This window is packed with magic. The features are explained in the AlphaTricks section of the manual and Help, but I’ll show the basics here.
We’ve known that many of you own AlphaTricks specifically to help organize your fonts. Usually that’s been done through renaming. We know it’s an unwieldy way to manage anything. Now, you can tag your fonts – this means they can be discovered by any category, using the category names you choose. One of the biggest challenges of this was to make the font catalog into a file that you can take from system to system as you copy your fonts, but we’ve achieved it. Even going across the Mac/Win divide, you can keep your Font Catalog organization.
Size also plays a big factor (oh, pun!) in selecting fonts, so there’s a Size filter, too. The sizes do overlap a bit, but with just a bit of looking, you can narrow in on what you want. By adding this size filter, your scrolling will be reduced. You don’t even need to create size categories of your own. You will anyway, just because you’re all teenagers at heart, but you don’t need to.
How about finding things by font creator? Yes, they’re in their own list, shown based on the names the designers use to install their fonts. They’re also sorted by native and imported, as the advanced features available with native fonts are becoming increasingly popular.
Sometimes, you may have designs loaded on multiple pages. Now, you can see fonts in use across multiple pages as well as the current page.When you want to be certain you’re using the same font on more than one page, you’re set.
If you don’t like how a font is named, you can now keep the font name but change how it is displayed in your personal Font Library.
There are other features in the window such as type-to-search and preview on design page. You can even discard a font or view information about the fonts. You can even take control of the new Font Cache.
Font Cache
The Font Cache looks at the fonts loaded by the system. The first time the program is run or when the font list changes, it creates a cache file. This single file is faster to read than thousands of fonts, allowing your Font Library to load much more quickly. Subsequent loads of fonts (when you run the program) can take less than half the time as that first time you boot the software. Even thousands of fonts can load in a matter of seconds, especially on solid state drives. My development system has 1188 test fonts from many makers installed, and loads in just over 1 second. I have a quick SSD, but it’s still going to improve load times on older PCs, so don’t worry if that’s what you have. In fact, the time savings are likely even more impactful for those older systems.
On a personal note, I’ve been working on Font Manager/Library for several years. It’s taken a long time to really come to grips with the exact design. Now that it’s there, you might think, “What else could it be?” but you’d be missing the point. It’s what it is because of a lot of time spent in thought, and quite a bit of trial and error.
Coming Soon
We do have one more ‘leapling’ about to arrive, but we’ll put that in another post. Here’s a hint: Tomorrow, February 27th, 2024, is National Retro Day. So truck on back for some more good vibes tomorrow!
Until then, cheers.
-Brian and the Elves