utoddl@ecsvax.UUCP (Todd M. Lewis) (03/16/89)
Hello again, net. I've been thinking about fonts (now that I have a good printer:-) and I would like to hear some comments on this idea-thingy I've got. Would it be possible to have font descriptions (metafont perhaps?) someplace, and have a call similar to OpenFont(), but which takes the bits/inch in x and y and the desired size of the font as parameters and produces an Amiga bitmap font? A program could request screen resolution copies of fonts for the screen, then request corresponding fonts in the printer's resolution for printing. This should work much better than trying to scale bitmap fonts. Metafont would be nice (that's what it was designed for), but may be overkill. Whatever form it ends up in, some sort of font editor would have to be provided. (Information on metafont is widely available and that system provides all the flexibility you could want.) The new font files could even be precompiled (maybe) so the system wouldn't have to worry about syntax errors, etc, in the font descriptions. This seems too obvious not to have been done before. Am I overlooking something? Has anybody done this? Should this be part of the OS someday? If it isn't it suffers from the same problem ARexx has -- not everybody has it. (I AM NOT COMPLAINING about it not being there now! The Amiga is a darn good system and I only want to help make it better.) Would software makers use this if it were available? If some kind soul were to do this, is there any way C-A would consider adopting/adapting it for a future release of the OS? Or is this capability already planned for a future release? -- Todd M. Lewis #include <std.disclaimer>
rokicki@polya.Stanford.EDU (Tomas G. Rokicki) (03/16/89)
> Would it be possible to have font descriptions (metafont perhaps?) > someplace, and have a call similar to OpenFont(), but which takes > the bits/inch in x and y and the desired size of the font as parameters Not to rain on your parade, but here are some specifics about METAFONT: - Requires about 650K to run - Takes 15 minutes to generate a 128 char font on a standard 68000 Amiga - Requires about 200K of source to be read in for same font - Program itself is 200K+ Building bitmap fonts automatically from practically any level of description and expecting them to look good is a very difficult problem . . . oh, you say you want legible fonts? Double that difficulty . . . even Adobe supplies bitmap versions of the common fonts for Display PostScript, rather than trying to generate the compromised fonts you would get at that size . . . -tom