¢DTP Atari8¢¢Part 8¢¢by Eric Bemrose¢¢¢DTP in Action¢¢ After examining some of the many DTP programs that are currently available in the Public Domain, it was my aim to show you how to use them in the construction of a newsletter.¢¢ At this point I have realised that there is really no substitute for hands-on experience. If you want to try DTP, then have a go for yourself, after all these programs are not going to break the bank. What you will need is time, imagination, and lots of effort, but the results could surprise you.¢¢ A sheet or two can be done on a page layout program. A larger project would be best done on a word processor, with or without further processing, as required. Graphics can be added as integral dumps or as separate page layouts. In other words experiment until you find what best suits you.¢¢ Finally I leave you with an interesting article taken from the Page Layout disk.¢¢FONTS FOR PRINTING by John McGowan¢¢ Atari fonts (which can be bit mapped to Gr.8 screens using Digital Editor, for example) are generally chunky. This is due to their use as SCREEN (as opposed to PRINTER) fonts on colour monitors.¢¢ To avoid artifacting, a lower case "i" is designed as:¢¢ ** *¢¢ ** instead of *¢ ** *¢ ** *.¢¢ By ensuring that one never has a pixel turned on between two pixels turned off, one avoids the problem that a Gr.8 pixel is only half a colour-clock wide.¢¢ Because of this, while Atari fonts support 8 pixel resolution horizontally, most fonts are designed with about 6 pixel resolution (not 4 since we can start a double pixel not only in the first, third, fifth and seventh position, but also in the second, fourth and sixth positions) (similar to fonts on most printers).¢¢ There is at least one font that I know of that is designed for monochrome monitors (and printing) called (various places) SANSERIF.FNT or SGLSNSRF.FNT, which is a SinGLe SaNs SeRiF font (single pixels being used, rather than double)... While this font produces artifacting when viewed on a colour monitor, it is fine for printing.¢¢ You can improve most of the Atari fonts you might wish to use in something like Digital Editor by using a font editor. Remember that you can ignore colour artifacting when creating fonts for printing!¢
