@BYLINE = by Roy D. Wolford @BYLINE = (Marin/Sonoma PC Users Group) @ARTICLE PAL = Product: FONTWARE 2.04 for Microsoft Windows. @ARTICLE PAL = Publisher: Bitstream Inc., Athenaeum House, 215 First Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. @ARTICLE PAL = Price: $95 for Installation Kit and $195 per Typeface Package. @ARTICLE PAL = @SUB TITLES = -The Program- @ARTICLE PAL = The Installation Kit comes with five 5 1/4 inch floppy diskettes and three 3.5 inch diskettes and a well written, easy to follow User's Guide. Each Typeface package comes with two 5 1/4 inch floppy and one 3.5 inch diskette. One 5 1/4 disk contains the PCL outline fonts. The other disk contains the PostScript PDL outline fonts. Each Typeface package comes with four fonts. Generally the fonts are in the same family (i.e. Swiss standard, italics, bold and bold italics). Bitstream currently has 160 outline fonts. @ARTICLE PAL = @SUB TITLES = -Installation- @ARTICLE PAL = @ARTICLE PAL = Installing FONTWARE is very easy. Just follow each step in the User's Guide. The steps consist of running the program and choosing the set up option from a menu. @ARTICLE PAL = @ARTICLE PAL = You will need to identify three different subdirectories, one for the FONTWARE program files, one for the fonts and one for the application of where the fonts files are to be installed. You will also identify the type of printer being used, the type of monitor, the symbol set, and the orientation of print: portrait or land-scape for HP PCL (Printer Command Language) printers. The Typeface (outline) files then need to be transferred from the floppy disk to the hard disk. Once this is done, you are ready to start the process of generation fonts. @ARTICLE PAL = @ARTICLE PAL = You will select the printer and/or screen fonts you want to generate from a easy to use menu. When the fonts have been selected, you press the F10 key to begin generating the fonts. The program will calculate, quite accurately, the time it will take to generate the different fonts, the amount of disk space required for the fonts and the number of printer and screen fonts to be created on the screen. It then prompts if you wish to proceed after displaying the information. If you do not have enough free disk space the program will not allow you to proceed. @ARTICLE PAL = @ARTICLE PAL = Each step of the font generation process is displayed on the screen. The first step is to build each character set for the selected fonts. It then makes the PCL font metric files (PFMs), followed by the PCL fonts, the Windows 2.0 GDI (Graphic Device Interface) fonts, the PCL fonts and the Windows fonts resource files. After all the files have been made, it installs the fonts in the WIN.INI file. If there are any errors, it will display a warning. You can run the program Showlog to see the details of the errors. @ARTICLE PAL = @ARTICLE PAL = Bitstream provides a new HPPCL.DRV file for PCL printers and a PSCRIPT.DRV for PostScript PDL printers. The HPPCL.DRV file is roughly twice the size (205k to 100k) of the file that comes with Windows 2.0. If you have Windows 2.1, use the HPPCL.DRV driver file provided with Windows. @ARTICLE PAL = @SUB TITLES = -Shortcomings- @ARTICLE PAL = @ARTICLE PAL = You can not append to an existing font file. For example, if you generated a font file with font sizes 8, 10, 12 and 14 points and you wanted to add size 16 to the font file you would have to gen-erate a new set of font files specifying all 5 point sizes ( 8, 10, 12, 14 & 16). @ARTICLE PAL = @ARTICLE PAL = The major drawback to generating the font files is the time it takes. The larger the font size the longer it takes to generate the fonts. Also the more fonts you are building the longer it takes. Typically, it took 10 to 20 minute to generate one set of fonts. A math coprocessor will reduce the time by about half. @ARTICLE PAL = @ARTICLE PAL = At the first attempt to generate fonts, I selected 8 different type-faces with font sizes ranging from 6 points to 144 points (2" in height) both in landscape and portrait orientation and screen fonts. The program indicated it would create 96 fonts, take roughly 13 hours to generate the font files (at 12Mhz, no math coprocessor), and could not continue as it would take 55M bytes of storage space and all that was available on my ``D:'' partition was 29M bytes. @ARTICLE PAL = @ARTICLE PAL = The other constraint is the disk space the files will take up. Again, the file size is dependent on the number of typefaces and sizes in the file. The smallest file I have is 13K bytes and the largest is 178K. @ARTICLE PAL = @SUB TITLES = -Summary- @ARTICLE PAL = On the plus side, the program is very easy to use and produces excellent quality fonts. If you do not need a lot of different font types and sizes, you can generate fonts very quickly. @ARTICLE PAL = @ARTICLE PAL = On the negative side, the Typeface Outlines are pricy, the fonts can take a lot of time to generate, can consume a lot of disk space, and there is no practical way to modify existing font files. <188>