hellerst@husc4.HARVARD.EDU (Joe Hellerstein) (05/11/89)
Short of a visit to the friendly neighborhood laserwriter, how does one ascertain whether a given font has info. built in to make it nice and smooth on the laser writer? Anything involved in making sure the font gets downloaded to the LWII besides having it installed in the System (using 6.0.2)? Thanks in advance... Joe Hellerstein
ajq@mace.cc.purdue.edu (John O'Malley) (05/11/89)
In article <1796@husc6.harvard.edu> hellerst@husc4.UUCP (Joe Hellerstein) writes: >Short of a visit to the friendly neighborhood laserwriter, how does one >ascertain whether a given font has info. built in to make it nice >and smooth on the laser writer? Anything involved in making sure the >font gets downloaded to the LWII besides having it installed in the System >(using 6.0.2)? > >Joe Hellerstein Here's my longish explanation of how fonts are printed on ImageWriters and LaserWriters. Netters, please post corrections to my explanation, if necessary. As I understand it, there are two major kinds of fonts: screen fonts and printer fonts. The LaserWriter has 11 printer fonts built-in to it, such as Times, Helvetica, Avante Garde, Palatino, Zaph Chancery, & Zaph Dingbats. The ImageWriter has no fonts built-in to it, for all practical purposes. Yes, it does have a couple of standard draft-mode fonts, but these are more or less useless to Mac users (see below). A screen font is that which you have installed in the System file on your Macintosh. To print a font on an ImageWriter, a Macintosh takes the screen font's double, scales it down 50%, and then prints it. That's how it achieves fairly-good looking font output. Example: You have both 12- and 24-point New York installed in your System file. You want to print a document done in 12-point New York. You tell the Mac to print in "best" quality mode. The Mac takes the 24-point screen font, scales it down 50% to 12-point, and then sends the page to the ImageWriter. So, when the double-size of a font isn't present, the Mac has to make approximations. This explains why a 12-point printout doesn't look very good when the 24-point screen font isn't installed in your System. A key point to recognize is that when you print a document on the ImageWriter, the Macintosh does all the thinking. It creates a bitmap picture of the document within its memory, and then slowly spits out this picture to the printer for printing. When you tell your Mac to print in "draft" mode, it doesn't send any font info at all to the printer. It uses the built-in draft font. That's why you can't see New York output in draft mode. The ImageWriter does the thinking, so to speak. To print a font on the LaserWriter, a Macintosh looks at the screen font that you've used and sees if the equivalent printer font is installed in the LaserWriter. If so, then it sends the document to the LaserWriter, which in turn uses its PostScript brain and built-in printer font to print the page. The major work is done by the LaserWriter, not the Mac. If the equivalent font is NOT installed in the LaserWriter, you'll see a message saying that a bitmap version of the font is being created for the LaserWriter. That's when the LaserWriter needs a "picture" (bitmap) of the screen font in order to print it, since no built-in printer font is available. New York and Venice are not built-in printer fonts on the LaserWriter. Try printing out documents made with those fonts. Then redo the same documents using Times and Zaph Chancery and compare the results. John O'Malley / Macintosh / Purdue University / (317) mace.cc.purdue.edu!ajq / Specialist / Computing Center / 494-1787
casseres@apple.com (David Casseres) (05/12/89)
In article <2371@mace.cc.purdue.edu> ajq@mace.cc.purdue.edu (John O'Malley) writes: > As I understand it, there are two major kinds of fonts: screen fonts and > printer fonts. "Bitmap" and "outline" fonts are better terms. A screen font is just a bitmap font that matches a particular outline font. Bitmap fonts can be displayed on the screen, or they can be printed. Adobe's outline fonts are only used for printing, in a Mac system; but on other systems like Next they are also displayed on the screen. Apple's outline fonts, announced this week, will be used for both screen display and printing. > A screen font is that which you have installed in the System file on your > Macintosh. Bitmap fonts are normally installed in the system file, but with Suitcase and similar utilities they can be in some other file or files. Adobe outline fonts may be built into a printer or they can be downloaded to the printer from files on the Mac. > To print a font on an ImageWriter, a Macintosh takes the screen font's > double, scales it down 50%, and then prints it. That's how it achieves > fairly-good looking font output. Example: You have both 12- and 24-point > New York installed in your System file. You want to print a document done > in 12-point New York. You tell the Mac to print in "best" quality mode. > The Mac takes the 24-point screen font, scales it down 50% to 12-point, > and then sends the page to the ImageWriter. The scaling occurs just by printing at 144 dots/inch instead of 72. The Mac draws in an offscreen bitmap with the 24-point font, then sends the bitmap directly to the printer, which gets 12-point size (and nice quality) just by having its dots closer together than the Mac screen. > A key point to recognize is that when you print a document on the > ImageWriter, the Macintosh does all the thinking. It creates a bitmap > picture of the document within its memory, and then slowly spits out this > picture to the printer for printing. It doesn't actually draw the whole document or even a whole page at any one time; it just draws horizontal strips across the page, one after another. > To print a font on the LaserWriter, a Macintosh looks at the screen font > that you've used and sees if the equivalent printer font is installed in > the LaserWriter. If so, then it sends the document to the LaserWriter, > which in turn uses its PostScript brain and built-in printer font to print > the page. The major work is done by the LaserWriter, not the Mac. Well, no. The application "draws" the page (which may contain graphics as well as text) using a sequence of QuickDraw calls, as if it were drawing to an offscreen bitmap -- or as if it were printing on an ImageWriter. The LaserWriter driver captures these calls and translates them into a PostScript program -- no mean trick, since QuickDraw and PostScript have entirely different models of how drawing happens. The driver sends the PostScript program to the LaserWriter, which executes it. The work is rather evenly divided between the Mac and the printer. David Casseres Exclaimer: Wow!
a_dent@vaxa.uwa.oz (Andy Dent, ph: 09 380 2620) (05/12/89)
In article <1796@husc6.harvard.edu>, hellerst@husc4.HARVARD.EDU ( Joe Hellerstein) writes: > Short of a visit to the friendly neighborhood laserwriter, how does one > ascertain whether a given font has info. built in to make it nice > and smooth on the laser writer? Anything involved in making sure the > font gets downloaded to the LWII besides having it installed in the System > (using 6.0.2)? About a month ago, two FREE Varityper DA'S were posted to comp.mac.binaries FontWizard and (I think) FontManager?. Anyway, one of these gives you a map of all the currently installed fonts, with ID's,NFNT info and also lets you know if it's a bitmap or laser font.
bayes@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Scott Bayes) (05/13/89)
Do we expect that Font/DA Juggler, etc will work well (at all?) with the System 7.0 outline fonts? Scott Bayes