THE ABILITY TO KEEP FONT FIDELITY without bloating file sizes is a vitally important feature when publishing high-resolution documents electronically. A new offering from Tumbleweed Software balances fidelity and size by using new font technology from Ares Software.
MiniFont. Ares' FontChameleon technology, which builds typefaces out of one master font by using tiny font descriptors, gains a more flexible cousin in MiniFont. Unlike FontChameleon, MiniFont can display typefaces (with optional 4- or 16-level grayscale anti-aliasing) without using a preinstalled master font. Any application that incorporates the MiniFont player can generate text on-the-fly after downloading the MiniFont descriptor file. However, the added flexibility does have a hitch: MiniFont files can be 8K to 16K in size, compared to FontChameleon's tiny 4K font descriptors.
Tumbleweed Publishing Essentials. The first product to incorporate MiniFont will be Tumbleweed's Publishing Essentials ($695), an expanded suite of tools for use with Novell's Envoy portable-document software. By using MiniFont, Publishing Essentials will improve Envoy's rudimentary font-handling capabilities. At first, you'll need the bundled Enhanced Envoy Viewer to view MiniFont-embedded documents created in Publishing Essentials, but a MiniFont-savvy version of the free Envoy Viewer may follow later this year.
Powerful text searches of documents are now part of the Envoy mix, thanks to the included Tumbleweed Viewer Extension. The extension adds support for both the Verity Topic and Rich Text Retrieval search engines, which rank the importance of text based on its size and style. And the process of setting up hypertext links becomes much easier with Link Builder, which uses your document's styles to automatically create links.
Best yet -- and sorely missed from Envoy 1.0 -- Publishing Essentials finally gives users the ability to create Envoy documents from PostScript, EPS, and Adobe Acrobat PDF sources, providing an easy avenue for creating high-fidelity documents from applications such as Adobe PageMaker and QuarkXPress. 415-363-7024.
