Mac Magazin/MacEasy 8/Mac Magazin and MacEasy Magazine CD - Issue 08.iso/Sharewarebibliothek/Updater⁄Infos/Fontographer 3.5->3.5.1/Fontographer® 3.5.1 ReadMe

Text File | 1992-07-21 | 11KB | 216 lines

••Fontographer version 3.5.1 ReadMe         July 21, 1992••

This version of Fontographer is one of the most exciting and
feature-packed upgrades that we have ever offered. Most of the new
features, including the freehand tool (with its option to work as a
calligraphic or a variable-weight pen), and Change weight function, to
name just a few, are easily accessible to all Macintosh users. Several
of our other new features, however, are what we call “Expert” features
which require some explanation before use. But first, some philosophy.

We have always tried to make Fontographer as easy to use as possible,
and so we have shielded the user from some of the more tricky (and
maybe, to some, esoteric) aspects of professional digital typography.
But the field is changing now, and we feel that more and more people
are going to want to know about these issues, so we have gone ahead
and included things like manual hint editing, other global hinting
features, font interpolation, and Multiple Master support in
Fontographer 3.5.1. These features will make many of our users very
glad, but for the other 90%, the important thing to realize is this:
Fontographer will still have its easy-to-use features, and these new
“Expert” capabilities are only there if you want them. Please don’t
think that you now need to understand hinting and vertical alignment
zones and things like that to use Fontographer “properly”: you don’t.
You only need to be concerned about these features if you plan on
using them, and keep in mind that some of them are not for the
fainthearted. Let me illustrate this “feature philosophy” with an
example:

I have a friend who bought a very nice sports car. He can probably go
150 mph in it, and now he wants to go to a racing school and learn how
to do controlled slides, and other out-of-control driving techniques.
His car lets him do these things; it has adjustments, and bells and
whistles, and everything one could want. And I’m sure he will spend
the money and take the time to learn all about them eventually. But
for now, it does everything that he needs; he drives to work in it
just fine, it does the job, and after all he doesn’t really need to
lay a solid unbroken layer of rubber down on the street every time he
goes to the grocery store.

Fontographer is like this sports car. You can drive it with the pedal
to the metal if you want to and you are able to, but you will probably
use it most often to simply go 35 mph through the city. In other
words, you absolutely do not need to use and get involved with
everything in the entire program in order to accomplish your task at
hand. For instance, manual hint editing is now in Fontographer, but
most of our customers will not have a need to use it. Multiple Master
font creation is there, and this is complicated and requires quite a
bit of work, but it will never get in your way to bother you unless
you specifically invoke it. So the moral of the story is, don’t be
intimidated by Fontographer just because it suddenly got a bunch of
complicated professional typographical features tucked away in the
Special menu. And when you can’t resist checking out these features
now that you’ve read this, don’t be dismayed if you don’t understand
them all or can’t make them work right away. This is difficult stuff,
for the most part, and the interface for these features is designed
not for the novice, but for the experts (who needed these
capabilities) so they can work with the greatest efficiency.
Fontographer is just as friendly as it ever was; it’s just that
computer typography is getting more and more complex.

Enjoy Fontographer 3.5.1; it’s a wonderful upgrade. The explanation of
what’s new can be found below, and Altsys still offers our customers
free, unlimited technical support, so you may call us, write us, or
contact us electronically, as many times as you like… forever. Please
do.

Sincerely,

Peter A. Mason, Font Products Manager, Altsys Corporation


•• Changes to version 3.5 in Fontographer 3.5.1 ••

New Features:

1. “Undefined character set (Symbols)” check box. When generating a PC
TrueType font, a new check box allows for a special symbol encoding
option. This is the same encoding format used in the new dingbats font
in Windows 3.1, “Wingdings.” Rather than converting your PC font to
the ANSI key layout (which results in 20 missing characters), Symbols
encoding will output every character in your Fontographer database
from the Dec 32 (space) to Dec 255 (caron) to the corresponding
Alt-0XXX keystroke. All characters in the normal ASCII (Dec 32-126)
sequence will remain accessible by striking the alpha-numeric keys.
But since extended ASCII characters on the PC are accessed by typing
the Alt-0XXX key combination, if you want the copyright symbol (©) you
would hold down the Alt key and type 0 followed by the Decimal number
for the copyright symbol, which is 169. Do likewise for every other
extended ASCII (Dec 128-255) character in your font. If you have any
characters mapped to Dec 0-31, they will not be output to the PC with
Symbols encoding. When symbols encoding is used, you must use the
Sequential ordering for the encoding to work properly. All other
TrueType preferences do apply. Symbols is not available for PC
PostScript® language type 1 fonts. The equivalent type 1 format is
generated when the “Adobe… encoding” box in “Font Attributes” is NOT
checked.

2. Fontographer 3.5.1 reads “PostScript-NeXT and other” Type 1 fonts.
3.5 didn't.

3. Several new ANSI characters are encoded in the final release of
Windows 3.1; they have been added. They are: The Ydieresis at Dec
217/Alt-0159. The circumflex at Dec 246/Alt-0136. And, the tilde at
Dec 247/Alt-0152.

4. When reading in TrueType fonts, the em-square is now preserved up
to a maximum of 2048. Em-squares found to be larger than that are
re-normalized to a 1000-unit em.

5. Ascent, descent, and leading are written into type 1 fonts and are
read back by Fontographer when they are opened. This is a Fontographer
comment convention, so this information is still unavailable from
other fonts.

Bug Fixes:

1. Multiple cut and pastes of a PICT in the background layer could
cause a crash.

2. Too many open bitmap windows could cause a crash.

3. A couple of obscure Windows TrueType bugs — created by the final
release of Microsoft Windows 3.1 — were fixed.

4. AFMs are now generated properly for the ATM-Windows installer even
if there are no kerning pairs. Before, if there were no kerning pairs,
MAKEPFM would crash (it couldn't handle the number '0' for the count
of kerning pairs).

5. Bitmap editing pencil can again be constrained via shift key.

6. You can no longer make 0-size hints by editing an existing one.

7. The caron character in Dec 15 is now properly encoded in TrueType.

8. When generating a PFM, Fog now properly calls it a Symbol font if
generating the Mac encoding vector. The previous value was illegal to
Windows and apparently caused Windows to believe it was looking at a
Symbol font, but it's better to put the right value there.

9. Fontographer now puts a -12 in TrueType italic angle for italic
fonts.

[Editorial Comment on #10 and #11: REMEMBER! ONLY Type 3 fonts can
have composite characters that don’t follow Adobe’s very strict rules
for internal composites, and Type 1 fonts CANNOT have *external*
composite characters]

10. When pasting a Get Part part into the font window, the width of
the destination char is now set from the Get Part character.

11. Generating composites previously always used the character width
of the first sub-char rather than the actual composite char. The width
used now is the width of the actual composite character.

12. A TrueType hinting problem in fonts with a short underscore
character is fixed. The rule is if the character height is less than
12% of the em, it won't be vertically hinted. The symptom this fixed
is aggressive hinting which made the character 0 pixels tall, making
it go away entirely.



•• Technical notes ••

Bad Multiple Master Font Printing

When generating Multiple Master fonts, it is absolutely necessary to
generate 10 point bitmaps and save them BEFORE generating MM fonts. If
you are see horrible spacing in the printed output of your Multiple
Master fonts, this IS the cause. This is a malady which does not
affect the new PostScript level 2 printers, but seems to strike every
other PostScript printer.

Embedding PC TrueType Fonts in Documents

Assume that you have created a font and you want to send a document to
an associate across the world who does not own your font. But you do
want that document printed in your font. Font embedding — or
encapsulation — is your solution. There are three levels of font
encapsulation. The most common level is none, or full protection. Such
a font cannot be sent with the file. The next level is read-only. In
this case, the document may be viewed and printed by your associate
who does not have the font, but changes cannot be made. The ultimate
level is read-write embedding which allows for full re-editing of the
document in the original font. Essentially, the whole font is sent
along for easy retrieval. Fontographer determines which level is
desired by parsing the “Notice:” field in “Font Attributes”. If you
want read-write encapsulation, you'll need to type “RWE” at the end of
your copyright notice. For read-only embedding, type “ROE”. For full
protection — no font embedding — then do nothing special; just type in
your regular notice. If the “Notice:” field is blank, then read-write
encapsulation is assumed.

Suitcase 2.0 and Multiple Master fonts

We ran across an old Suitcase 2.0 quirk while testing our Multiple
Master fonts. If you have several copies of the Multiple Master
PostScript files on your hard disk which were previously installed
with the old Suitcase II, you might notice those getting printed
rather than the currently installed font. There could be some
difficulties in printing some Multiple Master fonts which are
installed with Suitcase. This may not be wholly attributable to our
trusty friend Suitcase; we’re not exactly sure. But we thought we’d
warn you that if your are experiencing printing difficulties, or if
Adobe’s Font Creator crashes on you, then try quitting everything and
re-installing your fonts directly into the system.

LaserWriter IINT bug

We may have run afoul of the old “limited vertical stem widths bug” in
certain versions of PostScript in the LaserWriter IINT and PLW IINT.
We have not been able to get any Multiple Master fonts to print to our
PLWNT. Even Adobe’s own MM fonts won’t print. Just in case you find
this problem, our printers’ status follows: PostScript version: 51.8,
revision: 1 VM available: 513144 VM used: 106401