LaserWriter Driver: Font File Distinctive Icons Lost



The original LaserWriter drivers had a creator of LWRT and a bundle resource
that gave a desktop icon to PostScript font files that had the LWRT creator and
a type of LWFN or LWFn, as well as to Laser Prep files with a type of LROM and
creator LWRT. The new LaserWriter driver has a creator of LWRR, as does the
new Laser Prep.

So far, all the downloadable font files that I have seen still have a creator
of LWRT. Therefore, when one rebuilds the desktop, the icons for the
downloadable font files are lost unless one of the old LaserWriter drivers is
available. I tried changing the creator of a font file to LWRR, but even
rebuilding the desktop with a copy of the new LaserWriter driver on the same
disk does not result in anything other than a blank, generic icon. Is there a
trick I need to use?

Changing the font file's creator to LWRR should have worked. It turns out
that there is an anomaly in the BNDL resource in the LaserWriter 5.2
drivers that keeps the necessary information from being copied to the
Desktop file of a disk.

Specifically, the LaserWriter 5.2 BNDL resource specifies FREF resources of
IDs -8185 and -8186 for the two types of downloadable font files. However,
these FREF resources actually have resource IDs of -8189 and -8190. Since
the BNDL entries do not agree with the actual resource IDs for each FREF,
the information is not copied by the Finder to the Desktop file, and the
file icons remain blank.

If you want the icons to appear as they should, you can use ResEdit to
change the resource IDs of FREF -8189 to -8185 and FREF -8190 to -8186.


Published Date: Feb 18, 2012