mjv@iris.brown.edu (Marshall Vale) (12/07/89)
We just received Adobe Type Manager and of course I quickly installed it
on my Spectre GCR system to see if it worked. First, a little background.
Adobe Type Manager replaces the way the Mac displays fonts on screen.
Noramlly, the Mac uses bitmaps that are installed into the system. To get
a nice looking font on the screen, you need to have that particular size
installed for it to look nice. If you don't, then the Mac's QuickDraw
routines will try to scale it and most often, it looks very, very ugly.
ATM catches all those font scallings and uses its own outline fonts to
create nice, clean fonts in any size. This is very important for both
the screen and ImageWriter (or other dot matrix and QuickDraw printers)
in that all the fonts will scale smoothly.
My system is a Mega2 with a ICD host adapter and Seagate 277R 65 meg HD
and the Spectre GCR. The ATM disk contains the ATM INIT (an auto file)
and a control panel document (Cdev). There are two inits, one for the
68000 Macs and one for the 020/030 Macs; we, of course, use the 68000 one.
The disk also contains the outline font files for 4 fonts and their
bitmap fonts. For the ATM to work, you also need at least one bitmap size
font installed, the more the better(10 and 12 is a good minimum). You can
turn ATM on or off from the control panel and boot up in case an
application will not work with it.
Here are some interesting figures I found after using ATM for a bit.
Installing ATM and all the outline fonts files for the all the fonts in a
LaserWriter + (Avante Garde, Bookman, Courier, Helvetica, Narrow Hel.,
New Century Schoolbook, Palatino, Symbol, Times, Zapf Chancery, Zapf
Dingbats), took up about 1,350K on my HD. Note: I already had the bitmaps
for the fonts installed before ATM, your mileage will vary.) The amount
of memory that I had decreased by 200K. 100K is needed for ATM and a
minimum of 64K in needed for a font cache (you can set this). The font
cache holds the data for some of the scalled fonts that you have done. If
you use a font that has been previously scalled and is in the cache,
it appears instantaneous. The large the cache, the faster the scales are.
The scales themselves are very fast if you consider what it is doing.
Generating a 33 or 57 point size for example, took only a few seconds with
wonderful results. The larger the point size, the longer it will take.
I tested ATM with Word 4, MacWrite 4.6, MacDraw II 1.0, MacDraw 1.9.5,
both SuperPaint versions, and WriteNow 1.0. All worked.
ATM is a serious memory hog. 1meg users might want find that some of
their programs no longer run in so little room (about 600K). I don't know
if disabling ATM will help. However, it might be just your cup of tea since
it will do very nice results on QuickDraw printers such as dot matrix
printers, QuickDraw laser printers and the QD DeskJet.
BTW I didn't have time to check it out with my printer (Star NX-10) and
Epstart 2.5 (Epson printer driver) but I will report on that in a bit.
Hope you find this useful.
-- mjv@iris.brown.edu
"And, oh! Father Christmas, if you love me at all,
Bring me a big, red india-rubber ball."
A.A. Milne "Now We are Six"