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1988-01-05
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PC-Write
Font Selector Guide
by
Elizabeth Houser
and
David Locke
November 1987
PC-Write Font Selector, Version 1.0
Printed and published in U.S.A.
Copyright 1987 by Quicksoft. All rights reserved.
Quicksoft
219 First N. #224
Seattle, WA 98109
(206) 282-0452
Table of Contents
Installing the Font Selector 6
Running the Font Selector 7
Understanding the Font Selector's Main Screen 9
Assigning Soft Fonts to Font Letters 10
Moving Fonts from One Font Line to Another 12
Deleting and Undeleting Fonts 12
Moving Between Font Lines 13
Editing Font File Names 13
Changing the Name of the Print Control File 14
Saving the Print Control File 15
Exiting the Font Selector 15
Exiting the Font Selector Without Saving Your Changes 15
Using the Files Produced by the Font Selector 16
A Sample Session 17
Appendix A: Creating a Print Control File 20
Appendix B: The Font Selector Menu Options 22
Appendix C: Available Soft Fonts 24
Appendix D: Glossary 25
LaserJet is a trademark of the Hewlett-Packard Corporation.
What's a Font?
The term font can mean many different things. In the typesetting world,
a font is a complete set of letters, numbers, symbols, and punctuation
marks at a particular size in a specific typeface. (A typeface is a
particular type design, such as Times Roman or Helvetica.) In the world
of printers, the definition varies depending on the type of printer.
Non-laser printers (dot matrix, daisy wheel, and ink-jet) usually
support only one or two typefaces with enhancements. PC-Write calls
each enhancement a font. For example, a printer may have one typeface
with enhancements such as compressed, double wide, draft quality 10
characters per inch (cpi), draft quality 12 cpi, letter quality 10 cpi,
letter quality 12 cpi, boldface, italics, superscript, subscript,
underlining, and proportional spacing. PC-Write treats each of these as
a separate font.
In the laser printer world, there are two basic kinds of fonts: bit-
mapped and outline fonts. Some laser printers, like the Hewlett-Packard
LaserJet, support bit-mapped fonts; some support outline fonts. In a
bit-mapped font, each character is made up of a number of dots; to the
computer or printer, each of these dots is represented by a bit. In an
outline font, each character is stored as an outline or a geometric
description. This means that you can produce different sizes and styles
of characters from the same outline. Outline fonts must be converted to
bit-mapped fonts at some point.
Laser printers that support bit-mapped fonts, such as the LaserJet,
take the definition of a font one step further. To this kind of laser
printer, a font encompasses:
o typeface -- such as Times Roman or Helvetica
o point size -- maximum height of a character
o spacing -- fixed or proportional
o pitch -- number of characters per inch, if fixed spacing
o width table -- width of each character, if proportional spacing
o stroke weight -- regular, medium, or bold
o style -- upright or italics
o symbol set -- characters (symbols) available
o orientation -- portrait or landscape
An example of a font for a laser printer is: Letter Gothic, bold,
upright, 12 point, fixed spacing of 12 characters per inch, Roman-8
symbol set, portrait orientation.
If you need some further explanation of some of the terms used in this
Guide, there is a glossary of terms in Appendix D.
How Does PC-Write Treat Fonts?
When you edit a file with PC-Write, you use font letters to select the
fonts. The available font letters are B, C, D, E, F, H, I, J, L, M, O,
P, Q, R, S, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z. You select them by pressing the Alt
key and one of the font letters, or by using the <Alt-G>.R command with
a letter. See the PC-Write User's Guide for more information on these
methods.
2 PC-WRITE FONT SELECTOR GUIDE
PC-Write defines the meaning of each font letter for a particular
printer through a print control file. This file is created by the
WORKDISK program when you install PC-Write. WORKDISK actually runs a
program called MENULAZ to create the print control file, which it calls
by default PR.DEF. You can run MENULAZ to create a print control file;
the instructions are included in Appendix A of this Guide.
The print control file contains commands called font control lines.
Each font control line is associated with a font letter and contains
codes to activate that font on the printer. If one or more of the fonts
have proportional spacing, the print control file contains width tables
for those fonts. A width table tells PC-Write the width of each
character in the proportional font so it can justify, center, and
flush-right text.
When you print a file, the PC-Write print program processes it,
interpreting the font and dot commands and sending the output to the
printer. If the file contains a font command, the print program
retrieves the codes for that font from the appropriate font control
line in the print control file. It places the codes in the text file as
it processes it. PC-Write then sends the processed file to the printer.
Here's a diagram that illustrates what happens when you print with
PC-Write:
retrieving the
codes for the placing which is
looks at fonts from them into sent to
+---------+ +----------+ +---------+ +-----------+ +--------+
| the | | the | | the | | the | | |
| PC-Write| | PC-Write | | print | | processed | | the |
| Print |--->| text file|--->| control |--->| text file |--->| printer|
| Program | | with font| | file | | with | | |
| | | commands | | (PR.DEF)| | font codes| | |
+---------+ +----------+ +---------+ +-----------+ +--------+
What is the PC-Write Font Selector?
The font selector is a program that lets you customize a PC-Write print
control file for Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printers that use
downloadable soft fonts. It can also be used for other laser printers
that emulate the LaserJet. These printers support three different types
of fonts:
o Resident fonts that come already loaded in the printer's memory.
o Cartridge fonts that come from cartridges inserted into the printer.
o Soft fonts. These fonts are copied from a diskette into the
printer's memory. This is called downloading. Soft fonts are
available on diskette from Hewlett-Packard and other vendors. See
Appendix C for more information about available soft fonts. Each
soft font diskette contains a number of font files; each font file
contains information about one specific soft font and the codes to
be downloaded to the printer for that font.
You can use the MENULAZ program to create print control files for the
resident fonts and for all of the Hewlett-Packard cartridges. MENULAZ
can also create print control files for the most commonly used Hewlett-