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FontFiend

The complete manual for them most advanced Font Editor for RISC OS.

The Acorn font manager supports a font type known as Base 0. These fonts can easily be identified because they have a 0 at the end of their file name.

Base 0 fonts contain more than the normal 256 characters. FontFiend can load these fonts and convert them to the current encoding. For example you could load Homerton.Medium and convert it to a Latin 2 encoding. Base 0 fonts should contain the full character sets from latin 1,2,3 and 4. i.e. all letters, symbols and accents required to display most latin based languages. Some font suppliers supply fonts in Base 0 format with only the latin 1 characters defined. This means that the font has a lot of blank characters.

The original idea behind Base 0 was that the font manager would be able to select the correct encoding file for the given territory and then display any Base 0 font with the correct character set. However for some reason although this feature is built into RISC OS it doesn't actually work correctly.

When you load a Base 0 font FontFiend will first confirm that you want to convert the font to the current encoding. If the current encoding is the wrong one you can abort loading of the font, change the encoding, and try again.

Some Base 0 fonts, such as Homerton, contain a complex scaffold in which some characters from the tree may not occur in the encoding you are converting to. FontFiend will convert as much of the tree as possible, then remove any defective scaffolds. This ensures that the font will work in the new encoding. However you may find a few characters that have some missing scaffolds.

The font will then load and can now be treated the same as any normal font with 256 characters.

APDL and Foundation RISCWorld