Oakland CPM Archive/oakcpm.iso/cpm/list/bradcon.lbr/BRADCON.DOC

Text File | 1986-06-08 | 8.0 KB | 169 lines

  TO: everyone
FROM: Aaron M. Contorer, author of Bradford
DATE: May 1986
SUBJ: creation of fonts for Bradford

Greetings!  Last year I released Bradford 1.20, the near letter
quality program, to bulletin boards as "freeware," with the
idea that everyone could use the program free of charge, and if
they liked it enough to want to use its advanced features, they
could order the manual from me for U.S. $15.  Since that time, I
have received orders for hundreds of Bradford manuals, as well as
nice letters from people who did not wish to order the manual but
were successfully using Bradford.

Many of these letters contain suggestions or requests, and the
most popular idea has been that I let everyone know how to
create and edit fonts for Bradford.  In response to these
requests, enclosed herewith is Bradcon, the program I use to
make all Bradford 1.20 fonts, as well as the source code for
Font 1 (Typewriter) to help you get started.

Please use Bradcon all you like, give copies to all your
friends, upload it to bulletin boards, distribute it in software
libraries -- in short, help make it available to everyone, just
like Bradford.  There is no manual to buy; this file contains
the instructions.  Of course, I would hope that some people who
found Bradford "not quite valuable enough to order the manual for
$15" before will change their minds after acquiring Bradcon, but
that is essentially beside the point.

But wait -- there's more!  Included herein is not only Bradcon,
but also a whole collection of new fonts created by me and/or my
good friend and cohort-in-computers, Chuck Copeland.  The fonts
are as follows:
      8, Smallcaps.  This font was already released with some
copies of Bradford, but not all, so here it is for everyone.
It's based on Vanilla, but the lower-case letters are replaced
by miniature capital letters.
      9, Orator.  This is like Smallcaps, but everything is
taller.  The lower-case letters are almost as big as normal
capital letters, and the capital letters and other full-height
characters are even bigger.  This is the largest Bradford font.
It's made to attract a little more attention and to be especially
legible.
      A, Pizza.  (Yes, Bradford fonts can be named with LETTERS
as well as numbers.)  This is a very clean-cut font (with some
resemblance to Helvetica, for those of you familiar with
commercial typefaces), and is the FIRST Bradford font whose
general shape is not based on directly or indirectly on Font 1,
Typewriter.
     B, Jazz.  This is a type style popular in the United States
in the 1920's, and gaining some popularity again.  Characters are
generally very thick on one side but thin on the other side.
     C, Italic Typewriter.  This is similar to Font 6, Italic,
but the characters have serifs (those little decorative line
segments attached to the ends of many letters) as in Typewriter.

                          ----------

I hope you enjoy all these new fonts, free of charge.  If you
wish to have the source code for all the Bradford fonts, 1
through C, on a disk, you can order them from me by sending your
address and a check or money order for $20 in United States
funds to:
     Aaron Contorer
     Bradford 1.20 font disk
     1521 Central Avenue
     Deerfield IL 60015
     USA
Make the check payable to me or, if business purposes require
that you write a company name, make it payable to Concom
Enterprises, which is my company name.  If you live in Canada,
a Canadian Postal Money Order is an easy way to send U.S. funds.

Having the source code for the fonts is NOT necessary to print
with them; rather, it is an easy way to see how different fonts
are designed, and will give you a strong starting point to design
your own fonts, as well as allowing you to edit the standard
Bradford fonts.

Be sure to tell me WHAT KIND OF COMPUTER and WHAT OPERATING
SYSTEM you need the disk for.  I can supply a variety of 5.25-
inch (13.3 cm) disk formats.  The source code for the fonts is
copyrighted and may not be distributed through bulletin boards,
software libraries, etc.  The source code for Font 1 is included
herewith, so that should give you a good idea of the type of
thing you'll be getting and whether it will be useful to you.

                          ----------

Before I get on to how to use Bradcon, I thought this would be a
fine place to answer a few of the frequent questions I get from
users of Bradford 1.20.  So here are some interesting tidbits:

Bradford received its name at random.  I liked the name, and I
didn't want to call it "Dot Daisy" or "MatrixPrint" or some of
the other silly things that I could have called it.  The Pizza
font was also named at random.  Chuck and I were discussing
possible names for the font over a large pepperoni pizza, and we
weren't having much success coming up with a good one.  Hence:
Pizza.  (If anyone comes up with a really nifty name for this
font, let me know, and maybe I'll change it.)  Bradcon is just
short for "Bradford conversion program."

Bradford will NOT work on a Gemini-10.  It WILL work on a Gemini-
10x, which is quite different.  The list of Epson-compatible
printers that people have told me they are using with Bradford is
very long.  In addition, Bradford is being used on a great
variety of CP/M machines, not just the Kaypro; and a great
variety of MS-DOS machines, not just the IBM PC.

Bradford was written completely in Turbo Pascal.

Some bulletin boards received copies of Bradford without the
accompanying information file.  If you have a copy of Bradford
and don't know what to do with it:  the manual is available by
sending U.S. $15 to the address given above.

Bradford fonts must be named FONTx.BIN, where x represents any
letter from A through Z or any number from 0 through 9.  Bradford
does not know the English name (e.g. "Typewriter") of any font.
It only knows their letter or number.  There were only fonts 1
through 5 when Bradford was first released; hence, only these
show up on the screen.  But just enter any character, 1 through
D, and it will work.

                             ----------

And now, on to how to use Bradcon!

Bradcon reads the source code for a font in the form of a text
file, which must be named FONTxB, and creates the usable font
file (FONTx.BIN) as binary information.  The x in the two file
names will be the same.

The source code consists of 1520 lines of text, 16 each for the
characters space (" ") through tilde ("~") in order of the ASCII
character set.  The characters are shown on the screen as they
will look on paper, with a space representing blank area and a
lower-case "x" representing colored-in area.  The width of each
line in the text file should be no more than 9 characters; any
text past the ninth column will be ignored by Bradcon.

See FONT1B in this group of files as an example of a correct
Bradcon source file.  Once you have created a source file, run
Bradcon just by typing 'bradcon' and hitting Return at your
operating system prompt:
     A>bradcon
Your file must be in the currently logged drive and directory
(or area) before you run Bradcon, and it will output the .BIN
file in the same directory or area.  So if your file were on
drive B and Bradcon were on drive A, you might do the following:
     A>b:
     B>a:bradcon

Once Bradcon runs, it just asks you to enter a font number.
Press 0 through 9 or A through Z on your keyboard, and it will
be off and running.  Font conversion does not take very long,
and you will be returned to the operating system prompt when it
is done.  That's all!  Now you have a new .BIN file to use with
Bradford.  Remember to copy the file to the same place where your
other Bradford fonts are located.

Please enjoy and use Bradcon for yourself and give copies of it
to others.  You may NOT sell the software; you may only give it
away, in the spirit of Bradford.  If you create any NEW fonts,
not based on one of the fonts supplied by me, you can do with
them whatever you wish.  I hope you'll give them away.
∩0ΩZ╦