Aminet 5/Aminet 5 - March 1995.iso/Aminet/docs/rview/FreshFonts.txt

Text File | 1994-11-16 | 18KB | 483 lines

Path: news.uh.edu!barrett
From: [e-mail] (Markus Illenseer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Subject: REVIEW: Fresh Fonts CD-ROM, Volume 1
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Date: 17 Nov 1994 03:51:09 GMT
Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett
Lines: 466
Sender: [e-mail] (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator)
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <3aejvd$[e-mail]>
Reply-To: [e-mail] (Markus Illenseer)
NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu
Keywords: CD-ROM, fonts, shareware
Originator: [e-mail]


PRODUCT NAME

    Fresh Fonts CD-ROM, Volume 1


BRIEF DESCRIPTION

    This is a font CD for Amiga computers and other computer platforms.
It contains fonts in various formats.  All material is made available in
(original) archived form and unarchived form.


AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION

    Name:        Danny Amor
    Address:    Ludwigstr. 124
                70197 Stuttgart
            Germany

    Telephone:    [phone]

    E-mail:        [e-mail]


DISTRIBUTION

    Main places to buy the CD-ROM currently are:

    USA:

        Amiga Library Services
        610 North Alma School Road , Suite 18
        Chandler, AZ 85244-3687
        USA

        Telephone:    [phone]
        Fax:        [phone]

    Germany:

        Stefan Ossowski Schatztruhe
        Gesellschaft für Software mbH
        Veronikastraße 33
        45131 Essen
        Germany

        Telephone:    [phone]
        Fax:        [phone]


LIST PRICE

    The CD is free for everyone who buys a CD from either Amiga Library
Services (Fred Fish) or Stefan Ossowski Schatztruhe under certain conditions:
ask each distributor for details.

    For everyone else, a fee to cover costs and shipping of about DM
10.- (approximately $5.00 (US)) is charged.  This is my latest information;
please ask for more details if necessary.

    The CD is a shareware compilation and the author of the CD is asking
a shareware fee of DM 15.- ($10.00 (US)) if you like the CD.  If you don't
like the CD or aren't using it, you are requested to give the CD to someone
else who might find it more useful.

    I got the CD for free.


SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

    HARDWARE

        An Amiga computer.

        A CD-ROM drive such as the A570, A1270, CDTV, CD32 or any
        supported third party CD-ROM drive.

        512KB of RAM is required.
        2MB RAM is recommended, but 5-8MB RAM is best.

        A hard disk is recommended if you intend to install some of
        these fonts or programs for permanent use.

    SOFTWARE

        AmigaDOS 1.3 or higher.
        Works fine with AmigaDOS 2.x and 3.x (highly recommended).

        Requires a suitable CD-ROM filesystem such as AsimCDFS,
        AmiCDFS, AmiCD-ROM, Babel CDFS, or Xetec CDFS.


COPY PROTECTION

    None.


MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

    Amiga 3000, 2 MB Chip RAM, 12 MB Fast RAM
    Several hard drives.
    Apple CD300 (Sony CDU-8003A) CD-ROM drive.
    AmigaDOS 3.1 (Kickstart 40.68, Workbench 40.35)

    For further tests, I used a Macintosh Quadra 650 with internal CD300
CD-ROM drive and standard Finder 7.x setup.


REVIEW

    In a general overview, I would like to tell you about the makings
and the wherefrom of this CD-ROM.  I then will review the installation,
compilation and the overall use of the CD.


GENERAL

    Another CD-ROM review. Not bribed this time - I'm reviewing the CD
for fun and to support the idea of this shareware CD.

    As usual, I have some background of the process behind the making of
this CD, although this time I must admit that it is not that profound as it
might be.

    You might remember that Fred Fish wanted to test the idea of a
shareware CD-ROM.  After dozen of (fruitless?) discussions on Usenet and
private mail, he made the decision to start the test at this year's
"Computer `94" show (formerly World of Commodore or AmiExpo) in Cologne.
With 50,000 people attending, this show is one of the biggest for the Amiga
Computer, although the Amiga no longer is the main reason and platform for
this show.

    Fred found - not easy these days - a partner who has megabytes of
unseen material he wanted to share with other peoples.  Using this as a
base, he released the so called Fresh Fonts CD-ROM at the mentioned show.
Attending the show at the stand of the 'Schatztruhe' (English:  treasure
chest) of Stefan Ossowski, he gave everyone who bought a CD-ROM on this
stand and was interested into the Fresh Font CD a free CD.

    He did not accept the shareware fee in cash!  So the test still is
open up to the users:  is the idea of a shareware CD successful?  Will they
send Danny the fee? I really hope so.

    Until the release of the CD, or short time before, I hadn't heard
the name of 'Daniel Amor'.  He is responsible of the compilation of the CD
and is engaged as an 'unprofessional' but intermediate user and creator of
fonts.  He is not a professional typographer or designer.  But as fonts are
his favorite playground, he is very competent and actually knows quite a lot
of the background of creating and using fonts on several computer
platforms.  Of course he owns and uses an Amiga.

    To create one of his several dozen of Fonts, he uses the commercial
product 'TypeSmith' for the Amiga.  To gather the other material on the CD,
he sneaked into Usenet (comp.fonts) and the Internet.  Altogether he makes
available a nice assemblage of programs and of course Fonts.


INSTALLATION

    The CD was mastered in the ISO 9660 Mode 2 format (hence no crippled
filenames), I couldn't locate any directory level deeper than 4 or 5; hence,
the CD is ISO compliant and will work with almost every ISO filesystem.  The
disc has been proved to be readable on Amiga, Mac, and Unix.

    Installation is quite easy as only Assigns have to be performed to
use the supplied fonts.  These Assigns are multiple Assigns ('Assign Add
Path1:  Path2:  ...') and are only available on WB 2.x and above.

    There is no need to copy the fonts on hard drive unless you really
need them there instead of on the CD-ROM.

    The above installation applies only to Amiga platforms.  We will see
later that the use of the fonts on other platforms is more difficult.


DOCUMENTATION

    The text on the cover on the CD is in English only and describes the
contents and the status of the CD.  A hint to read the README file on the CD
itself is given.

    The README.1ST file on the CD is written in English, German and
French, and covers the status, copyright and contents of the CD (legal
mumbling).

    Also available on the CD is an AmigaGuide hypertext file which again
covers the status and so forth, but also is a very nice document about the
distributed material.  Same content is made available as HTML hypertext to
be read with the supplied Mosaic hypertext viewer (Mosaic requires the
application packet MUI, which is not on the CD!).

    Both documents are very well edited and do cover the entire content
of the CD in either text and (!) pictures. Supplied programs are documented
as well as the fonts themselves. All text is available in English, German and
French. Very nice multilingual compilation!

    All fonts are described in text - where they come from, the author,
the status (PD, FD, etc.), the features, and pictures - sample of the fonts
as inline or external image of the fonts.


FRESH FONTS Vol 1

    Now finally I come to tell you about the content of the CD. As you
might already gave guessed, the CD contains fonts, fonts, and fonts. And
fonts. And programs to create or deal with fonts.

    I thought I had a nice assemblage of fonts on my hard drive -
through the years of using my Amiga, I gathered about 20MB of fonts.  I was
wrong: there are lot more fonts. :-)

    Made available on this CD are about 200 fonts (font families) which
are classified into 6 categories .  There are the usual Script, Serif,
Sans-Serif fonts, but also Deco (decorative) and Picture fonts.  Last but
not least, there is a class which is of special interest of Danny Amor:
non-Latin fonts for our Hebrew, Russian, Greek, Arabic and even Chinese
friends.

    Most of these fonts are made available in different file formats:

      - Adobe (can be used on any system, also used for Postscript)
    - Truetype (native fonts of PC-Windows)
        - Intellifonts (Agfa Intellifonts, native Amiga format, also common
      on Mac)
    - Amiga Bitmap (Amiga computers only)
        - DMF (Amiga DTP program Pagestream 3.0 format)

    This makes the CD apparently very useful in multiplatform
environments found in design and video studios, as well as private use at
home.

    This covers the largest part of the CD, with about 400MB.

    The rest is covered by programs for Amiga, Mac, Acorn and PC.
Unfortunately the compilation is not fully achieved:  the first volume of
this CD only contains programs for the Amiga and PC. Not owning a PC, I can
review only the supplied Amiga programs.

    Some very useful tools are found on the CD; among them two
excitingly useful packages for me.

    PasTeX version 1.4 BETA (3) - newer version than found on Fresh-Fish
Vol 1 and Meeting Pearls Vol 1 - is installed on the CD.  As one might
expect this version of the archive contains more fonts and resolutions ever
made available for an Amiga TeX distribution.

    Another tool - to be voted tool of the month - is 'cachefont'.  This
tool reads the entire fonts list you have on your system and writes them
into a list. Now a daemon has to be started to 'patch' the requests of fonts
by other programs such as 'Sys:Prefs/Fonts'.  Amazingly fast! Only the list
is read and displayed, and not the entire system, so you stop wasting time
to wait for the lists - it's done once only. It takes about 5 Minutes to
generate the list of the fonts of the CD - with cachefont this task is to be
done once and not every time you open a font requester.

    More tools to be used directly from CD are various converters, a
font editor, and two word processors. One of them is 'rashumon', which is
capable of displaying and editing text and graphics in various fonts, even
editing text from right to left.

    A wonderful supplement is 'hebrewbible' - it contains the text of
the hebrew bible ('Old Testament') (I believe it is a full archive and
covers the whole bible, but then again I am not qualified to tell this; many
apologies to our Jewish friends among the readers!).  Also this archive
contains programs for the Amiga to read and display the texts with the
hebrew fonts supplied on the CD.


USAGE OF THE CD

    The overall use of the CD is easy.  Tools are made available in
archived from for BBS usage and in unextracted form to be started directly
off the CD. This also applies to PasTeX.

    Very useful is the script 'assignallfonts', which adds the entire
font archive to the Amiga font path. There are several other 'assignfonts'
in lower directories, so you can choose which part of the fonts you want to
use on your system.

    So once you clicked on the 'assignfonts' icon, you can use the
fonts. Now let us have a closer look at the fonts.

    Usage on Macintosh Computers is ... not given, I will discuss
this matter in the 'dislikes' section.

    Usage on PC could not be tested.


FONTS, FONTS, FONTS....

    I am no typographer and have no idea what a good font must have to be
good and useful. So browsing though the fonts only showed to me that there
are a *lot* of fonts. :-)

    Using several word processors and DTP programs such as a borrowed
PageStream yielded the conclusion that the fonts are usable and offer a nice
playground to destroy any hopes of proper use of typographic rules for
layouts. :-)

    One major drawback is that many of the fonts do not have Umlauts or
other special chars. This is very pitiful, and seeking out for reasons I
found out that most of the fonts which ignored the existence of Umlauts were
made by our friends of non-metric countries such as the USA.... *BANG* :-)

    If you ever intend to create fonts of your own, please do create
Umlauts, too. The Amiga is using ISO-8859-Latin-1 as a base for chars and
fonts and is not fixed to 7Bit Ascii chars - same even does apply to Windows
and X11!

    Another topic is the overall used class of proportional fonts.
These fonts are not useful in word processors such as 'Cygnus Ed', because
of their dynamic allocation of length.  Most of the fonts are proportional
and hence are designed appropriately.  Thus the use of these fonts is
directed to DTP, DTD and other usage of this kind.  This is of course not a
drawback.

    To continue the test, I went to a friend who is graduated typographer
and owns a Macintosh computer.  After struggling hard around with his basic
installation (he does have many DTP programs and such, but no converters
for fonts or a program with capability of reading GIF pictures...) we had to
conclude that the CD is useless for basic Macintosh environments.  Neither
the Suitcase utility nor Font-DA-Mover (both standard utilities on the Mac
to deal with fonts) was able to read any of the fonts directly off the CD.

    It looks like that the fonts have to be converted with special
utilities to a Mac-readable form (resource files for HDFS of Macintosh are
missing).  Unfortunately these tools are not supplied on the CD itself.

    I couldn't yet fully test the Postscript fonts on the CD.  A small
test with 'PostView' on the Amiga showed that the fonts did not load because
of wrong filenames - but it could be my fault.

    Missing for all platforms other than Amiga are programs to view the
document: Mosaic is only made available for Amiga. Using 'ncsamosaic' on the
Mac showed that the supplied hypertext is readable.


LIKES

    I like the overall compilation.  It shows that unseen and unknown
material can be made attractive and useful for everybody.

    A very nice idea was to use Mosaic to document the enormous variety
of the fonts; using inline images at appropriate places makes the use of the
fonts very easy.

    Also good idea was to make the programs and the fonts (!)  supplied
on the CD be available for BBS in archived form.

    A wonderful idea was to supply 'cachefont' - a grateful thank you to
Adam Daws, the programmer of this tool.

    The CD is sending another signal to other compilations:  multilingual
documentation.  Really good and standard setting.  But then again Danny Amor
seems to be a genius in languages anyway.  He has knowledge of Russian,
Czech, Arabic as well as Hebrew, German, English, French and Italian
languages (and appropriate fonts).


DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS

    I have the impression that somehow the author had not that much time
to finish the CD. There are no programs made available for Mac and Acorn
although the directories are created and the platforms are mentioned on the
cover of the CD.

    No technical background or guidelines are given. I miss at least the
comp.fonts-FAQ from Usenet. I might have expected guidelines for Amiga
programmers about how to use fonts in their programs. As a sidenote I should
say that this is of course not the task of a CD, but this assemblage is the
first of its kind on the Amiga and it could have set more standards.

    The hypertext is missing an overview of *all* the fonts on one
(large) page to browse them. An easy task.

    I really do miss more hints about how to use the CD on other
platforms. The sentence 'ignore the .info files on the CD' is easily said
but useless information. It is really necessary to give a guide to the user
of this CD on other platforms.

    Also I miss Mosaic binaries for the Mac, PC and Acorn. Without this
application you won't be able to display the documentation on these
platforms.

    The README file was edited on the Amiga - and hence only contains
carriage returns rather than carriage returns and linefeeds at the end of a
line. This makes the text hard to read on other platforms.


COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS

    Using Fonts is essential in DTP and DTD environments. There are
dozen of professional CD-ROMs available with many fonts on them.  Most of
them are really expensive and contain professionally edited and created
fonts. Other are available for free and supply a tool to choose desired
fonts for which then you have to pay for. These CDs are only valuable for
specific platforms such as Macintosh computers.

    I have used an original Agfa Compugraphic font CD on the Amiga some
time ago. Compared with the fonts on the Fresh Font CD, these fonts are of
course way more professional. But the goal of the Fresh Fonts CD is not
being professional but useful for low budget users.

    To my knowledge there is no other CD-ROM available which is directed
for use on Amiga, so comparison with similar products is a difficult task.


BUGS

    No bugs found - if you can find bugs in fonts at all.


VENDOR SUPPORT

    Danny Amor is reachable via email and answers questions quite
promptly. Same does apply to Fred Fish.


WARRANTY

    Standard warranty applies to this CD.


CONCLUSIONS

    The CD is very useful on the Amiga - if you are in need of fonts!  A
nice product which fills the gap left open until then in the corner of DTP
and DTD.

    A must for every Amiga user - video, graphics or word-processor user
and even programmer.

    I will rate the product with 4 out of 5 stars.  The last star can be
achieved when the promised multiplatform usefulness of the product is
achieved.

    Rating the product for Amiga-only usage would give a 4.5 out of 5;
the last half star can be achieved when my complaints are somehow fixed.


COPYRIGHT NOTICE

    This review represents my honest opinion.  Your mileage may vary -
tell me about it!  If you use this review in any way - re-publishing for
example, the author requests at least a copy of the used media.  Special
thanks to disk magazine 'Amiga Gadget' who did so in the past.

    Copyright 1994 Markus Illenseer.  All rights reserved.

    You can contact the author at:

        Markus Illenseer
        Kurt Schumacherstr. 16
        33613 Bielefeld
        GERMANY

        [e-mail]

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