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Recording the Font in a Selection

Any object that records fonts that the user can change should tell the font manager what the font of its selection is whenever it becomes the first responder and whenever its selection changes while it’s the first responder. The object does so by sending the shared font manager a setSelectedFont message. It should pass in the first font of the selection, along with a flag indicating whether there’s more than one font.

The font manager uses this information to update the Font panel and Font menu to reflect the font in the selection. For example, suppose the font is Helvetica Oblique 12.0 point. In this case, the Font panel selects that font and displays its name; the Font menu changes its Italic command to Unitalic; if there’s no Bold variant of Helvetica available, the Bold menu item is disabled; and so on.

If you need to draw text using PostScript operators such as show, it’s recommended that you set the current font using NSFont’s set method, rather than the PostScript operators setfont or selectfont. This allows the Application Kit printing mechanism to record the fonts used in the PostScript output. If you absolutely must set the font using a PostScript operator, you can record the font with the Application Kit using the NSFont static method useFont. See the description of that method for more information.

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