UG1459@SYSE.SALFORD.AC.UK (01/23/89)
Dear ST'ers,
I would like to ask for help, a friend of mine has posed the following
question. Is there any kind Atari wizard who can supply the answer.
"Could you please ask if anyone knows if/when Atari are going to implement
horizontal offset tables in GDOS - these allow a character to be backspaced
or moved forward before it is printed, and are necessary for printing
accents, Hebrew vowels, and such like. I have spoken to Bob Katz at Atari UK,
but has not so far been able to provide any information on this. At present the
only way of editing and printing vocalized Hebrew etc is to use Signum, which
is frustrating since GEM is supposed to have this capability"
I will pass on any response, it will be gratefully received.
Robert Chafer,rcd@mtuxo.att.com (XG1V6-R.DUTT) (01/24/89)
In article <8901231537.AA29862@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>, UG1459@SYSE.SALFORD.AC.UK writes: > "Could you please ask if anyone knows if/when Atari are going to implement > horizontal offset tables in GDOS - these allow a character to be backspaced > or moved forward before it is printed, and are necessary for printing > accents, Hebrew vowels, and such like. > [rest of text deleted] One reason I initially bought my ST was to design fonts for Indian languages like Hindi and Bengali. I thought, hey, if a Macintosh can do it, why not the ST? I used Neocept's Fontz program to create a GDOS font, but soon found that there were no word processors around that would let me backspace over to the previous character and type another character on top of it. This capability is essential for Indian languages, which have many so-called "composite" characters, i.e., a character which is made up of two or more characters joined together. Think of the Spanish tilde (~) as a character, which when joined with the letter "n" produces the composite character n-tilde. In Bengali there are so many combinations like these that you run out of ascii codes to represent them in a font file, so the ability to overlay one letter on top of another becomes crucial. So on the ST I had to resort to Degas Elite to place GDOS font characters in arbitrary positions. In high resolution the quality is satisfactory on a 9-point printer, but then Degas Elite is meant to be a great paint program, not a great output-resolution word processor. Well, all my problems were solved when I bought Specter 128, and started to run MacWrite on my ST. Now, I really like my ST, but when it comes to foreign languages, the Mac really shines. But with Specter, I have both (for all practical purposes)! The foreign language fonts that are available for the Mac, make use of the Mac's OPTION key to place a letter over the previous one, and make languages like Hindi and Bengali a snap. Now there's no reason an ST word processor can't do the same thing, and make use of the ALT key like the option key, but so far, I know of none. Thanks for listening. -Rana Dutt rcd@mtuxo.att.com AT&T Bell Laboratories, Middletown, NJ