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1990-04-25
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ADIT 1.6
Copyright (c)1990 by P.A. Geelen, 23-04-1990, Amsterdam.
The program ADIT.EXE (version 1.6) is placed in the
public domain by the author. It may be used and distributed freely.
It may NOT be sold under any condition,
nor be made part of anything that is sold,
nor may fonts generated with ADIT be commercially distributed.
Note that distributing variations of commercial soft fonts
is probably illegal.
Suggestions and financial support of any kind will be much appreciated.
Pieter Geelen, Giro 5618822, Poggenbeekstraat 26', Amsterdam.
ABBS 03240-11234/16491 Node 282/200
Email: geelen@cs.vu.nl
ADIT 1.6 is a simple, user-friendly, high-speed program that allows one to
generate variations of existing soft-fonts for HP (compatible) laserprinters.
In particular, given an existing font, ADIT is able to generate:
- bold-face versions
- normal versions (of bold-faced fonts)
- (half-)italic versions
- outline versions
- several variations of shadow, half-shadow and backshadow versions
- enlarged/reduced versions
- non-proportional versions (of proportional fonts)
- landscape versions (of portrait fonts)
- "Patterned" variations
- "Waved" variations
HOW TO USE ADIT 1.6
===================
ADIT 1.6 will offer you a menu of options. Any time you want to create a
variation of an existing font, you:
- select an option from the ADIT menu, (e.g. "[B]old")
- answer a few questions concerning your preferences, (e.g. "how bold?")
- select an existing soft font (the "template" of the operation),
(ADIT offers an alphabetically sorted file selection window for this)
- specify a name for the new font.
ESC is the general "abort"-key. You can abort any question, window or font-
generation with it.
THE OPTIONS
===========
[C] : CHARACTER RANGE
restricts any of the options mentioned below to characters within a
certain range.
[T] : TRACE OPTION
Switches the (Hercules/CGA) graphic display ON/OFF.
[V] : VIEW OPTION
Just allows you to "view" a font on the screen in graphics mode.
(Trace mode will automatically be turned "on")
[B] : BOLD
- this option allows you to create a "bold-faced" version of a font.
You must specify "how bold" you want the font to become: the number
of dots (1/300 inch) that you want the font to become bolder
horizontally resp. vertically.
In my experience, values (1,1) will make a 12-point font appear
"overstrike", (2,0) will make it appear "bold". As an experiment,
try (4,0) and (0,4).
Larger fonts will need higher values.
- This option will increase the Pitch with the horizontal bold-value.
[U] : UNBOLD
- Some fonts, especially 24 and 30-point fonts, are only distributed
in their "boldface" version. The UNBOLD option allows you to create a
"normal" version of a such "bold" fonts. UNBOLD also exactly reverses
the BOLD-option. You must specify the number of dots (1/300 inch) that
you want the font to become less bolder horizontally resp. vertically.
Note that (for instance) a horizontal unbolding of 2 dots will make
lines of 2 dots wide disappear completely.
- This option will decrease the Pitch with the horizontal unbold-value.
[O] : OUTLINE
- this option allows you to create an "outline" version of a font. You
may specify the "thickness" of the outline (up to 31 dots). Personally,
I like an outline of 1 dot thick best. Higer values produce a "stronger"
outline.
- This option will increase the Pitch with 2 times the thickness.
[I] : ITALICIZE
- this option allows you to create an "italic" version of a font.
You will need to provide a "Slope factor", X/Y. You will
get the best results (and the highest speed) when you specify the
slope precisely (i.e. not 33/100, but 1/3). In my opinion,
1/3 produces half-italic (about 70°)
1/2 produces normal italics (60°)
1/1 produces very italic fonts (45°)
- This option will NOT alter the Pitch.
[S] : SHADOW
- this option allows you to create a "back-shadow" version of a font (an
outlined font with a black "shadow" behind it). You will need to specify
the "displacement" of the shadow in dots. For fonts of about 12 dots,
a displacement of 4x2 looks good.
- This option will increase the Pitch with the horizontal displacement + 2.
[H] : HALFSHADOW
- a variation: generates "grey" shadows instead of black shadows.
[F] : FAKE
- creates a variation where the characters are themselves gone, but
"suggested" by their shadow. It's difficult to explain in words,
I couldn't even find a good keyword for this option.
Just try it out on any font with a displacement of 2x2.
Also try an outline of thickness 1 on a 1x1 [F]aked font.
- This option will increase the Pitch with the horizontal displacement.
[D] : DISPLACE
- This creates a "perspective" version of a font. Try it out with a
displacement of 4x4 on a thin font.
- This option will increase the Pitch with the horizontal displacement.
[E] : EXPAND/REDUCE
- This option "stretches" a font in horizontal and vertical direction.
You may specify the horizontal and vertical stretch-factors seperately.
Examples:
14/12 x 14/12 will generate a 14-point version of a 12 point font.
(Though not perfect, this option is able to create quite acceptable
fonts of 6,7,8,10,14,18 and 24 points, given a 12-point font).
2 x 1 will produce what is known on dot matrix printers as
"enhanced" characters.
1 x 2 will "stretch" the font so that is becomes 2 times as high.
- This option will multiply the Pitch by the horizontal factor.
[R] : RASTER
- This operation allows you to "raster" a font with a 8x2 pattern.
You need to specify 4 bytes. If you are not familiar with
bit-patterns, use the [P]attern option.
[P] : PATTERN
- This option allows you to "raster" a font with a raster of any size.
You need to make a seperate text-file with the extention .RAS.
In this file, you put your raster, in the form of stars and dots.
The raster may be any size, but the size in horizontal direction
must be a multiple of 8 dots. Example file:
8 <---- horizontal raster size
4 <---- vertical raster size
**..**..
**..**..
..**..**
..**..**
[L] : LANDSCAPE
- This option does not take any input: it just converts portrait fonts
to landscape fonts.
NOTE: ADIT version 1.6 does not yet allow ANY operations on
landscape fonts. If you want to convert landscape fonts
to portrait fonts, you'll have to wait for the next version
of ADIT.
[!] : OPTIMIZE
- Reduce a soft-font-file to optimal size.
The HP laserjet allows efficient storage of "sparse" bit-matrices,
which means that a lot of the white space "around" a character
does not need to be stored in the soft-font files.
Some soft-fonts do not make use of this capability, and thus use
more than the necessary amount of disk space and (worse) printer
memory. Several of my non-commercial font files appeared to be three
times as large as necessary.
NOTE: ADIT itself optimizes all generated fonts automatically.
[Z] : CENTER & FIX
- Creates a non-proportional font of a proportional font. In order to
make it look good, characters are "centered" in their cells.
- This option changes the Pitch.
[W] WAVE
- This option is a kind of generalization of the "Italic"-option.
The option takes a file with the extention "WAV", and uses it
to shift a staight vertical line into the form as specified in
the wave file.
And example WAVE-file looks like this (without the comments!)
8 <---- horizontal wave size (multiple of 8!)
6 <---- vertical wave size
*
.*
..*
...*
..*
.*
The WAVE may be any size. If the characters are higher than the
vertical wave size, the wave will be "repeated".
In the archive are several demo wave-files.
- This option will NOT increase the Pitch.
[A] : Adjust Pitch
- This option adjusts the pitch of the font, and the "escapement" of
each character. The adjustment is specified in dots. For negative
values, the characters are printed "closer together".
Example use: Suppose you use ADIT's "bold" option, with values (1,1).
Every character of the resulting font will be spaced one dot "wider"
than the original font. If you don't like this, [A]djust the
bold font with the value -1.
[x] : EXPORT
- This option will create a STAR/DOT bit-map of a selected font.
You can then edit the font using an ordinary text editor.
[m] : IMPORT
- Converts such a file back into a soft-font.
Note that these options can also be used to re-order existing
character sets. For instance, you could change the order of the
characters 128-255 so that they conform to the order of the IBM
character set, or copy the ordinary lower-case letters to the
128-255 character set, and add the small dots and stripes in order
to create é,â,ä,à,å etc.
HISTORY
1.0 - Fist release of ADIT
1.1 - Took bug out of ENLARGE-option, added WAVE-option
1.2 - Added the graphic "TRACE" option
1.3 - Added the VIEW-option
1.6 - Many non-commercial fonts appeared to use the strict
data definition rules rather lightly. Up to version 1.3, ADIT
crashed on nonsensical datalengths. Version 1.4 only produces
warnings. Also made some cosmetic changes.