dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt) (03/29/89)
I'm trying to locate a Mac screen-font with the following characteristics:
1) Fixed pitch (like Courier and Monaco). 10-pitch would be ideal; 12
pitch would be OK.
2) 12-point height would be best; 10-point would be OK.
3) Readable. A simple typewriter-like appearance would be ideal, but
I'd gladly accept any reasonably-good-looking fixed-pitch font.
4) Public domain.
Background: I own an HP DeskJet, and use the "Printer Interface III"
driver from DataPak Software. This driver can access the DeskJet's
built-in Courier font (and other HP fonts on cartridge). The built-in
font can be printed _very_ quickly, and it looks pretty good. However,
the HP incarnation of Courier is a true 10-pitch font; the fixed-pitch
fonts for the Mac (Courier and Monaco) are in the 11- to 12-pitch range.
As a result, the character spacing on the screen doesn't match the
spacing on the DeskJet's printed page, and the output suffers from some
substantial mangling... lines tend to run off the right edge of the
page, and differently-styled output (e.g. boldface and underlined text)
is misplaced.
So... I'd like to take an existing fixed-pitch screen font, clone it,
add fractional-spacing information, and (in short) turn it into a
correct on-screen equivalent for the DeskJet's Courier font.
I've succeeded in some initial experiments along these lines... I've
been able to clone Monaco, turn it into a new font-family called
"DeskJet", and add fractional-spacing information to the resulting NFNT
resource. [This required some of the hairiest ResEdit bashing I've done
in some time!]. I also cloned-and-modified "Hood River", a very narrow
12-point font; I've persuaded the DataPak driver to use the 16.67-pitch
HP Courier built-in font when printing this one.
I'd like to repeat this experiment, discarding Monaco and instead using
a PD font that I can legitimately redistribute after modification. I
gather that redistribution would be a no-no if I based the new "DeskJet"
font on Apple's Monaco font, or on either Apple's or Adobe's Courier
screen-font. [I downloaded Hood River from a local BBS, and believe
that it's PD; if it isn't, somebody _please_ tell me!]
Almost all of the PD fonts in my collection are proportionally spaced,
and don't look good when forced into a fixed-pitch mode. Ditto for the
fonts I was able to find on a couple of well-stocked BBS's in my area.
So... if anybody has such a font, and could email me a BinHex of it, I'd
really be grateful. Or, if you know of such a font available for
download from a BBS, or on a user-group diskette, or (final resort)
available on a PD/shareware disk from a commercial reseller such as
EduCorp, I'd very much like to hear about it.
--
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