Archive Magazine 1996/ARCHIVE_96.iso/discs/mag_discs/volume_2/issue_07/fwpfonts/FONTFIDDLE

Text File | 1995-06-22 | 5KB | 87 lines

FONT FIDDLING

Paul Beverley, the editor of ARCHIVE for the Archimedes, has a lot to
answer for. In a recent edition of his publication was printed a short
routine to convert the extra fonts, supplied on the Master Welcome disc,
from BBC to Archimedes format. On the face of it this looked as if it
would be a useful little routine but I did not reckon on the persistence
and sheer bloody mindedness of one S.J.BASS.

The main problem originally, (apart from Steve's pestering) was that
only half of the character set was defined. i.e. characters 32 to 126.
Steve, in his wisdom, decided that one of the fonts (7by8) looked very
good with First Word Plus and decided to redefine the rest of the
characters to match the ones already done. Around this time, while
passing the evening using a friend's electricity and drinking his coffee
(not that he makes very much coffee), Mike (the freind) showed myself
and Steve a copy of First Fonts, a program which did something very
similar to what Steve wanted.

The next step in this story was when I (Reg) foolishly mentioned that it
would be quite simple to set up F.W.P. to utilise the IBM graphics
available in one of the alternative character sets within the printer we
both had (NEC P2200). Steve then decided that redesigning the font on
his Master was not the way to do this, mainly because the font then had
to be converted to Archimedes specifications, and this is where I made
my second mistake. (In future I may staple my lips together when Steve
is around). I suggested that maybe it would be possible to convert, what
was mainly a basic program, to a form that would save fonts in the
correct format and also run with the Archimedes mouse.

Around this stage Steve became almost unbearable as he talked of nothing
but font design and constantly asked where in the character set he would
place which of the characters. It even reached the stage at times where
he would bury his head in pieces of paper and scribble cryptic notes
mumbling about IBM, OCR B and LATIN 1 fonts. During this period, every
time we held a conversation, it would always revert to the font for the
Archimedes and converting the designer program. The problem of
converting the program to work on the Archimedes was not too difficult
by even an amateur programmers standards but to make it save the font in
it's correct form for the Archimedes proved more problematical. The
initial difficulty was caused by the fact that Acorn, in their wisdom,
had compacted the program and also made it MODE independent, up to a
point. The latter fact meant a lot more program than necessary had to be
read and decoded before the relevant routines could be found. A number
of abortive attempts were made to rewrite the save font routine but each
time nothing was achieved except making the computer's character set
look like hieroglyphics. Eventually after an evening spent messing
around with various projects I decided to break down the routine into
it's component parts and attempt to reconstruct them as they were
required. At around midnight, with Steve still mumbling about fonts, and
still juggling his bits and pieces (of paper), the breakthrough occurred
and within seconds the new routine lay written before me. (It was almost
that dramatic anyway). The remark from Steve was along the lines of
"Good. Do you want to put this character here or not ?", at which stage
a swift goodnight was bid and home I went.

Having added the newly created masterpiece to the original program and
passed it on to Steve, who then admitted that the font was already
designed on the Master, I received a phone call from you know who
suggesting that maybe a program for copying characters within the
character set itself may not be a bad idea. This was written and passed
on to himself, only to be told the news that the program should actually
transpose characters rather than just overwrite one with another. Again
this was done without delay. It was about this time when I thought I
would see a grown man cry.....me! The next task was to create the
printer driver for F.W. P.. This marathon is usually achieved by
modifying an existing wordprocessor/printer driver file, which involves
changing the relevant values for the various functions listed within the
file. e.g.superscript,subscript,nlq etc. After this fairly simple part
comes the task of entering all the codes to achieve the extra characters
over and above what it is possible to enter from the keyboard: as
allowed by F.W.P.. For characters 32 to 127 this was obviously quite
simple as all that was needed in this instance was each character's
number, but it was soon noticed by both of us that the characters
between &80 and &9F ( decimal 128 to 159 ) were not defined by the
existing list. After an abortive attempt to define these characters, and
failing to get them to install, it was decided that we would have to
discard 32 ( yes a whole 32 ) of the characters so lovingly designed by
Steve. I am fairly certain that at this stage I may have seen a wobbly
bottom lip.

To be fair to Steve if he didn't pester me and make my life a bit of a
misery sometimes I don't think much would get done. This doesn't mean to
say that I enjoy it.

        Reg Dalton