Word Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 15 Sample Your System Fonts

Your system probably offers more
than 100 fonts. How do you choose the
right one? If you rely on simple trial and error,
you'll quickly find yourself frustrated. Instead,
use this hack to get a sample of every available font.

They say there's no accounting for taste, and
that's certainly true about fonts. With hundreds of
fonts coming preinstalled on most computers, and thousands more
available for purchase online, there's something for
everybody.

The tried-and-true method of choosing a font in Word is to select
some text and then scroll through the Font pull-down menu on the Formatting
toolbar until something strikes your fancy. But when you can see only
about a dozen fonts at a time, as in Figure 3-4,
it's hard to compare all your options.

Figure 3-4. It's difficult to compare over 100 fonts when you can see only 12 at a time

You can stop Word from displaying your most recently used fonts at the top of the font list. Open up the Windows registry and find the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Version\Word\Options Add a new String value (EditNew) named NoFontMRUList and give it a value of 1.

Word includes a built-in Font menu, but
it's not part of the main menu bar by default. To
view it, select ToolsCustomize, click the Commands tab, and
select "Built-in Menus" from the
Categories list. In the Commands section, select the Font menu and
drag it to your main menu bar.

You can scroll through the font menu as described above, but a more
efficient, more organized, and more fruitful method of comparing your
fonts would be to generate a table of some sample text, formatted in
each of the available fonts on your system.

This hack creates a new document containing a two-column table with a
row for each available font. The first column lists the
font's name, and the second column provides some
sample formatted text. The macro sorts the font names alphabetically.
A portion of the results is shown in Figure 3-5.

Figure 3-5. Font sampler output

If you have a large number of fonts installed, this macro could take
a few moments to run.

3.3.1 The Code

The new document this macro creates will be based on the Normal
template, and the font names will be displayed in Times, a standard
font nearly guaranteed to be on any computer.

Put the following code in the template of your choice [Hack #50] :

Sub FontSampleTable( )
Dim vFontName As Variant
Dim iFontCount As Integer
Dim i As Integer
Dim tbl As Table
Dim sSampleText As String
Dim doc As Document
Dim rng As Range
sSampleText = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
sSampleText = sSampleText & Chr$(32) & UCase(sSampleText)
sSampleText = sSampleText & Chr$(32) & "0123456789"
sSampleText = sSampleText & Chr$(32) & ",.:;!@#$%^&*( )"
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Set doc = Documents.Add
iFontCount = Application.FontNames.Count
Set rng = doc.Range
rng.Font.Name = "Times"
rng.InsertAfter ("Font Name" & vbTab & "Sample" & vbCr)
i = 1
For Each vFontName In Application.FontNames
StatusBar = "Preparing Sample " & i & " of " & _
iFontCount & " available fonts: " & vFontName
rng.Collapse wdCollapseEnd
rng.InsertAfter (vFontName & vbTab & sSampleText & vbCr)
rng.Font.Name = vFontName
i = i + 1
Next vFontName
StatusBar = "Formatting Sample Table ... Please Wait"
doc.Content.ConvertToTable Format:=wdTableFormatWeb1
Set tbl = doc.Tables(1)
tbl.Rows.First.Range.Font.Bold = True
tbl.Rows.First.HeadingFormat = True
tbl.Columns.First.Select
Selection.Font.Name = "Times"
Selection.Rows.AllowBreakAcrossPages = False
Selection.Collapse wdCollapseStart
tbl.SortAscending
StatusBar = "Done"
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End Sub

To help speed things along, this macro takes advantage of
Word's ScreenUpdating property.
If you set it to False at the start of the macro,
Word will not waste valuable CPU resources constantly redrawing the
display. While screen updating will automatically resume once the
macro finishes, it's considered good form to
explicitly restore it at the end of your code.

Because this macro may take a few minutes to run on a computer with a
lot of fonts installed, you can use the StatusBar
property to report on the code's progress [Hack #65] .
The status bar provides meaningful user feedback, particularly if the
macro takes time to run. Setting the
ScreenUpdating property to
False will not affect the status bar.

3.3.2 Hacking the Hack

With a few modifications, the generated table can use selected text
instead of arbitrary sample characters. This trick is especially
useful if your text contains symbols or special characters that may
not be defined in certain typefaces, as in the case of the Harrington
font, shown in Figure 3-6.

Figure 3-6. Seeing samples of special characters can help you narrow the choices among fonts on your system

The following code is a variation of the
FontSampleTable macro shown above. With this
version, the macro uses the currently selected text as the sample
text for each font. If you select more than one paragraph, it uses
only the text in the first paragraph.

Sub FontSamplesUsingSelection( )
Dim sel As Selection
Dim vFontName As Variant
Dim iFontCount As Integer
Dim i As Integer
Dim tbl As Table
Dim sSampleText As String
Dim doc As Document
Dim rng As Range
Set sel = Selection
If sel.Characters.Count >= sel.Paragraphs.First.Range.Characters.Count Then
sSampleText = sel.Paragraphs.First.Range.Text
' Need to strip off the trailing Paragraph mark
' for the table to generate properly
sSampleText = Left$(sSampleText, Len(sSampleText) - 1)
Else
sSampleText = sel.Text
End If
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Set doc = Documents.Add
iFontCount = Application.FontNames.Count
Set rng = doc.Range
rng.Font.Name = "Times"
rng.InsertAfter "Font Name" & vbTab & "Sample" & vbCr
i = 1
For Each vFontName In Application.FontNames
StatusBar = "Preparing Sample " & i & " of " & iFontCount & _
" available fonts: " & vFontName
rng.Collapse wdCollapseEnd
rng.InsertAfter vFontName & vbTab & sSampleText & vbCr
rng.Font.Name = vFontName
i = i + 1
Next vFontName
StatusBar = "Formatting Sample Table ... Please Wait"
doc.Content.ConvertToTable Format:=wdTableFormatWeb1
Set tbl = doc.Tables(1)
tbl.Rows.First.Range.Font.Bold = True
tbl.Rows.First.HeadingFormat = True
tbl.Columns.First.Select
Selection.Font.Name = "Times"
Selection.Rows.AllowBreakAcrossPages = False
Selection.Collapse wdCollapseStart
tbl.SortAscending
StatusBar = "Done"
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End Sub