System 7.1 Tip O’ The Week

To get you into the mood for System 7.1, Robert Hess passed on this tip from Leonard Rosenthol, chief technical wizard at Aladdin Systems. Apparently you can put FKEYs and other resources in System 7.1’s special Fonts folder and the system will open them automatically. When the system opens a file and leaves it open, as it will do for font suitcases, the resources in that file become part of the standard operating system. So, if you put a file containing resources of any type, FKEYs, sounds, etc., and change the TYPE of the file to a font file’s type, either FFIL or ffil, the system will open that file.

When I asked about this, Leonard said "I tried to convince Apple to actually allow other file types to be opened by that piece of code, but they wouldn’t do it (though it is REALLY easy to add)." I guess that would have been too easy and made too much sense, although then the folder would have needed a new name since it makes little sense to put FKEYs in a folder called Fonts.

Information from:
Robert Hess — [email protected]
Leonard Rosenthol — [email protected]