Font suitcase

How can I create a new font folder? I’ve tried duplicating another font folder and emptying it, but this doesn’t seem to work properly. Why not?

Mark Clay

Font folders are referred to as ‘suitcases’, and are different from regular Finder folders. The Finder’s New Folder command can’t create a new font suitcase ‘folder’. The simple way to produce a new font suitcase is to choose an existing one from the Fonts folder (in your System Folder), option-drag it to create a copy outside the System Folder, double-click on the new copy of the suitcase, select all the fonts in it, drag them to the Wastebasket and empty it. This should leave you with an empty font suitcase ready to accept new fonts. Don’t attempt this on fonts which are still in the System Folder, or which may be in use by an application. If you want to do more sophisticated things with fonts, you should consider buying a specialist utility, such as Suitcase 8 or 9.

Sleep settings

My iMac can sleep in two different ways, depending on whether it ‘times out’ according to the settings in the Energy Saver control panel, or the Sleep menu command is selected in the Finder menu. Why? How can I force a Finder-type ‘deep’ sleep after a specified time interval?

Keith Tizzard

This behaviour is correct, but is an incongruity in the sleep system. A regular ‘time-out’ or ‘light’ sleep, controlled by the Energy Saver control panel settings, may be terminated by moving the mouse. But the ‘deep’ sleep resulting from the Finder menu command requires a keystroke to trigger a wake-up and won’t respond to the mouse. The only way you could invoke the latter would be if you could make a script to call that Finder menu command. You may find it easier to use Sleeper, a shareware replacement for the Energy Saver control panel from St. Clair (www.stclairsoft.com). This gives you a fuller and more consistent range of controls over all aspects of sleep.

Old monitors

I want to use a new Power Mac G4 with my existing AppleVision 1710 monitor. Is it compatible? What can I do with the ADB port on the monitor?

Alex Taylor

You can use older AppleVision monitors that use ADB ports and non-ADB Macs, but you’ll lose the advantages of software control. In particular, this means auto-calibration won’t work, so you’ll have to perform a manual calibration to ensure you get good colour matches ­ for example, using ColorSync profiles. You can still add a USB-to-ADB adaptor to give you access to some older ADB devices, but these don’t appear to work with Apple’s ADB-based monitors. The most important feature ­ that of auto-recognition of the monitor’s available resolutions and so on ­ is, thankfully, not dependent on ADB connection, but on the monitor cable itself.

DVD in PowerBook

How can I get a DVD drive for my PowerBook G3 Series laptop?

Andy Brattle

Although some PowerBook G3 series machines may have been supplied with internal DVD drives in the US, none were so configured in the UK. You may be able to locate a US dealer who could perform the conversion for you, but this has a high element of risk. Probably your best bet is to look for an external DVD drive with a PC Card interface, such as the Freecom model. If you want to play DVD video discs, you’ll also need to locate a Mac-compatible MPEG decoder card. You should also cost-out trading in your PowerBook for a current FireWire model, which has an integral DVD drive and impressive software decoding.

Type control in Word

Although I’m not that fussy about typography, I want to be able to kern pairs in a document properly so they look good when viewed as Acrobat documents. Can Microsoft Word 98 handle this?

Marek Lisiewicz

Although extremely sophisticated in some ways, Microsoft Word is at heart a word processor, and isn’t designed to offer the facilities you would expect in a serious publishing system. It lacks the kerning controls that you can enjoy in the likes of QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign, or Adobe FrameMaker. Word does allow basic kerning of single pairs of letters, but you can’t edit more global kerning tables to be applied wherever those pairs occur. If you’re sufficiently sensitive about typography to be concerned about kerning in this way, then you really would do best with an application aimed at serious publishing. If XPress and InDesign seem too oriented to magazine-style layout, look at FrameMaker, which is designed to be easier to use for longer and more technical documents.

Floppy disk

When I upgraded my Power Mac 7600 (running RAM Doubler) to Mac OS 8.5, it didn’t recognise the floppy disk drive, although that works fine under System 7.5.3 or when running Mac OS 8.5 from CD-ROM. Why is this and how can I fix it?

Stephen Price

While you’ll find that more recent versions of the Mac OS have discontinued support for some floppy disk formats (notably the old 400K single-sided format), if your Mac has a floppy disk drive, it should still work. The fact that the CD-ROM version of 8.5 does still work properly suggests it’s your installation which is causing the problem. This either means that your System Folder isn’t complete, or that something you’ve added, such as RAM Doubler, is messing it up. The best way to find out is to restart with just Apple’s Mac OS 8.5 extensions running, using that option in the Extensions Manager control panel. If the floppy then works OK, try adding your third-party extensions back one at a time until you’ve isolated the one that’s causing the problems.

CD jukebox

We need to access a major reference database which is spread over several CD-ROMs. What’s the best jukebox or CD drive stack for this?

Mal Simkins

Juke boxes, which consist of one or more CD-ROM drives and a mechanism for feeding CDs to them, and CD stacks, which are just lots of drives in a single case, are rapidly falling out of fashion now that huge hard disks are so cheap. You may still want to choose a jukebox if you have a very large number of CDs to access, and aren’t worried about their comparatively slow access times.

This is fine if, for example, you keep seldom-accessed archives on the CDs. CD stacks rapidly become very expensive, and pose plenty of hardware problems too. Most users now opt for a packaged server which caches the CDs onto one or more fast hard disks ­ and, thankfully, most reference databases sold on CD-ROM permit this. The best of these servers are, in fact, miniature PCs (‘thin servers’) running Linux and proprietary software, so that they sit on an Ethernet network, talking to the client access software. Prices start at under £2000, and models to watch out for are those from LaCie (Gigabox range) and Optology (www.optology.com).

cross-platform network

I want to set up a network of two old and new Macs, and two PCs, using 100Base-T Ethernet. What hardware and software will I need?

Graham Dawe

If you’re really insistent on 100Base-T and not 10Base-T, this could be a problem, as you’ll almost certainly need to buy new network interface cards for the older models, and even then you may not be able to reach such high speeds. Unless you’re moving very large files around a lot, you may find little difference in overall performance anyway. Each computer then needs to be connected to a 10/100Base-T hub (make sure that the hub has good support for the higher speed) using 100Base-T-compatible unshielded twisted-pair (UTP) cables.

You have a wider range of options when choosing software. The main choice is whether you wish to have a central server, running Windows 2000, NT 4, Novell Netware, Linux/Unix, or AppleShare IP, or whether you want to have distributed facilities. In the former case, you’ll need to buy and configure the server software: AppleShare IP is by far the simplest, but will then tie up one of your Macs as the server. The other proprietary products (Windows 2000, NT and Netware) have special Mac support modules which need to be configured, a process which can be extremely frustrating.

Distributed networking is by far the cheapest, as you can simply run TCP/IP protocols over the network, allowing the sharing of volumes and their contents. The most basic way to accomplish this is to run FTP server software on one end of an intended connection, and then use an FTP client on the other, just as you might over the Internet. However, this can be quite fiddly to set up, and isn’t particularly friendly. A much neater approach is to splash out for copies of Thursby’s DAVE (from www.thursby.com), which allows you to mount Windows disks on your Macs just as if they were networked Mac disks. The DAVE manual is also an excellent reference on configuring TCP/IP connections across mixed networks.

Document layout

What’s the best software, word processor and/or emailer, which will allow me to send my CV as a properly laid-out document to prospective employers?

George Keyes

Email is one of the oldest features of the Internet and, because of this, it has some of the most primitive features. Standard email messages that can be received and understood by all email applications are based entirely on plain text. Several schemes have been proposed for styling and formatting options, but each is only supported by a limited number of email programs. You can, of course, enclose a file with your message, and this could contain a better formatted version of your CV. You then have to choose which application you’ll expect the recipient to have in order to read the enclosure.

Microsoft Word is the most common word processor on PCs and Macs, but if you don’t have it, opening a Word file using another word processor can prove impossible. Word’s recommended exchange type, Rich Text Format (RTF), can be read by most word processors, but not all, and can result in strange changes in layout and style.

The most reliable way of having complete control over the layout and format of the document is to convert it into Adobe Acrobat’s PDF format, but the recipient would then need Acrobat Reader (free) to view it. The final option worth considering is HTML, the language used for Web pages. Some email programs can display HTML-formatted messages like Web pages, and the great majority of email users do have a Web browser. However, HTML doesn’t give good typographic or even layout controls, so you’ll need to take care designing your Web CV (which you could, perhaps, also post to your Web site).

Browser colour display

When I view a GIF with a background in Web-safe colour (#336633) against a Web page background of the same colour, in one browser the colours appear different when viewed in thousands of colours. However, when viewed in 256 or millions of colours, or using a different browser, the backgrounds are indistinguishable. How can I fix this?

Simon Gregory

Having tried this using the latest releases of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator, this no longer appears to be the case. However, it may be that older versions of those browsers contain a bug in which HTML-defined colours aren’t rendered exactly the same as graphics defined as the same colour. This could account for the difference.

If this is a browser bug, then there’s precious little you can do to correct for it. If you adjust the colours, then other browsers will see them differently. However, if you use a small single-colour GIF as a tiled background image, you can avoid any potential difference between HTML-defined and GIF colours. Another approach would be to put a footnote on the page advising those who do see a difference that they might like to upgrade their browser to the latest version, which fixes the bug.

Alternative word processor

Is there a word processing package which will save me the complexity and cost of Microsoft Word, but which works well with sectioned documents?

Eddie Hartnell

Although Word does dominate work processing on Macs and PCs, there are plenty of other exciting products available to cater for niche markets, such as those who need to build sectionally structured documents.

If you don’t want sophisticated layout capabilities, but must work in chapters or sections, then Z-Write (from Stone Table, at www.designwrite.com/sts) is a relatively cheap product with a lot going for it. It can generate RTF and HTML output, for importing into a traditional word processor or Web browser respectively. AppleWorks can also handle sections fairly well, so that’s also worth considering.