Having recently reviewed Zenta Multimediaæs Font Emporium CD-ROM (8.10 p45), my first thoughts on reading in the June magazine about these fonts was simply that, if they are converted PD versions from the USA, the price seems rather high. I am now given to understand that the term Public Domain is a bit of a red herring in that, for some of the fonts, iSV use American PD PostScript fonts as an inspiration and the results have very little, if anything, left of the original font after it has been re-designed.
Having obtained Packs 277 (2╫800Kb discs) and 298 (3╫800Kb discs) from Paul, I set about having a good look at them. Pack 277 contains 36 families with a total of 276 fonts, and Pack 298 has 39 families with a total of 282 fonts.
All fonts contain the styles or faces of Regular, Condensed and Extended, all with corresponding oblique styles. In addition, 10 families on Pack 277 and 8 families on Pack 298 contain Bold styles. The Bold styles again contain a further six faces of Regular, Condensed and Extended, again with oblique styles. In plain language, 20 font families have a total of 12 styles each, the remaining 55 having six styles.
Unlike a lot of PD fonts, they really are complete, containing all the characters in the Latin 1 set. They have been well converted from the original source, with scaffold lines, and kerning data has been added. I understand that, where necessary, some fonts have been redrawn. The end result is very good and the fonts contain all those foreign characters with accents, as well as fractions and most of the other öoddò characters associated with a good quality font.
The discs come in a compressed form, apparently using !CFS, and need to be installed. Read the !iSVManual first which gives clear instructions about doing this, and the amount of free hard disc memory required. Clicking on the !iSVFonts application brings up a menu which gives you a choice of whether to install to an Acorn !Fonts folder, EasyFont or FontDirectory. I tested the installation using all three methods and I am happy to report that there were no problems.
The on-screen menu tells you what to do and when to change floppy discs. In addition, you get a warning that it will take about 5 minutes. After using ArcFS as my compression system for several years, I found this time delay a little irksome Ö I have got used to almost instant access.
Having installed the fonts, I then set about producing a document with Impression Publisher using all the fonts, although only one style per font. In order to be able to see results clearly, I used 24point characters. The end result is extremely good, all printing well, with no rough edges, and my initial reservations about the price were soon dispelled.
It is obvious that a lot of work has gone into producing these fonts and the selection on both packs is well varied. Compared to other PD fonts on the market, they are far superior and are obviously suited to the professional DTP user as well as the home user. Naturally, cost comes into the argument and, in the end, it boils down to what you can afford. Pricewise, iSV fonts appear to fall nicely between the inexpensive, but often incomplete, PD fonts, and those produced on a more professional basis.
As regards memory, you will need about 5Mb of hard disc space in order to install both packs. For anybody with a shortage of memory, I would recommend installing to an Acorn !Fonts folder first and then perhaps sorting the fonts into various directories which best describe the font, such as Script, Serif, SansSerif, Heavy etc. They could then be saved back to floppy discs and used when required. It is important to note that, at the moment, installation directly to floppy discs cannot be done. However, if you have a machine without a hard disc, but with extra memory, you could install the fonts by creating a RAM disc of around 4Mb. It might be possble to do this on a 4Mb computer by making as much memory as possible available and doing one pack at a time. The de-compressed fonts could then be copied to floppy discs of a size suitable for your setup.
This memory restriction is my only major criticism of these otherwise excellent packages. It seems to me that by making the packs so large, the author is is not catering to the needs of Acorn users with machines which do not have a hard disc. Perhaps consideration might be given to producing a smaller öBest ofò pack to tap into this market. Any advertising for these font packs should clearly indicate the memory restrictions and the need for a hard disc. (iSV say they are going to change their adverts to say this.)
One minor criticism is that it would be nice for the installation window to tell you that it is actually installing the fonts, instead of continuing to give you the message Ö öClick on the OK button to installò. iSV tell me that a newer version of the installer will be added to the packs shortly, which corrects this, and will also include an install to floppy option.
Apart from the foregoing, these packs are highly recommended to potential users. Contrary to what was stated in Archive 8.9, iSV aim to launch one new product a month, not just font packs. In fact, they think that producing more than three font packs a year would be almost impossible. They are interested in producing software that is related to DTP on the Acorn platform.
The price for the font packs is ú25 per pack or ú45 for the two, plus ú1.50 post and packing, direct from iSV Products.
All testing was done on a 26Mb RiscPC with a 410Mb hard disc.áu
