[comp.sys.mac] Creating Overlay Fonts Using Fontographer

alex@rata.vuw.ac.nz (Alex Heatley) (11/24/88)

Hi,
   I've been working on a font using Fontographer. The font I'm creating uses
Times-Roman as a base and adds bits to some of the characters (a fairly
trivial exercise--I know). Unfortunately while it works nicely in plain text
mode, the bolding doesn't look too good. 

Now, I know this is because the postscript generated when I send a file to
the postscript device tells the device to apply the standard bolding algorithm
to times-roman, rather than telling it to use times-roman-bold instead. 

I've also guessed that what I want to do is apply my changes and create
another down-loadable font using times-roman-bold as the base, but what I
can't figure out is how to tie that back to my bitmap font so that when I use
bolding in a document it automatically knows to download the bold version.

After talking to our Mac programming expert, it seems that such a feature has
something to do with the FOND resource, Fontographer mentions that it
correctly creates these resources but that it cannot edit them. 

Thus, my question is: Does anyone know how to edit a FOND resource in such a
way that it points at different down-loadable fonts for different styles? Is
there a utility or a ResEdit template for this? Or am I wrong in my
assumptions? 

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Alex Heatley                                Computing Services Centre
Domain: alex@rata.vuw.ac.nz                 Victoria University of Wellington
Path: ...!uunet!vuwcomp!rata!alex           P.O Box 600, New Zealand.
Trolls can often be found under bridges ... or in Computing Departments.

pool@blake.acs.washington.edu (Jonathan Pool) (12/03/88)

I called Altsys with the same question and they told me it was absolutely
impossible to do, unless one has the bitmap fonts for the nonroman
LW fonts.  But I tried just editing the name of the PS base font, which
appears once near the end of the downloadable font file's data fork.
This worked.  So it is definitely possible.  How to make it easy and
elegant I don't yet know, but my guess is that one should manufacture
bold, italic, etc. bitmap fonts with FONTastic Plus based on the Roman
bitmap font that is furnished; then edit the FOND style mapping table
(APDA sells the book "Apple LaserWriter Reference", which explains the
format of this table) to identify the bitmap and PostScript fonts in
the family, and then use Fontographer to edit the bold etc. fonts as
one normally would.  Altsys also told me that the information about this
(alleged) impossibility, which should have been in the Fontographer
manual, is instead in the manual for another Altsys product, Keymaster.

alex@rata.vuw.ac.nz (Alex Heatley) (12/05/88)

In article <330@blake.acs.washington.edu> pool@blake.acs.washington.edu (Jonathan Pool) writes:
>I called Altsys with the same question and they told me it was absolutely
>impossible to do, unless one has the bitmap fonts for the nonroman
>LW fonts.  But I tried just editing the name of the PS base font, which
>appears once near the end of the downloadable font file's data fork.
>This worked.  So it is definitely possible.  How to make it easy and
>elegant I don't yet know, but my guess is that one should manufacture
>bold, italic, etc. bitmap fonts with FONTastic Plus based on the Roman
>bitmap font that is furnished; then edit the FOND style mapping table
>(APDA sells the book "Apple LaserWriter Reference", which explains the
>format of this table) to identify the bitmap and PostScript fonts in
>the family, and then use Fontographer to edit the bold etc. fonts as
>one normally would.  Altsys also told me that the information about this
>(alleged) impossibility, which should have been in the Fontographer
>manual, is instead in the manual for another Altsys product, Keymaster.

Thanks for the help. I did manage to solve the problem, but it's a real hack.
What I did was choose a name for my font that was the same length as the word
"Times" I then when into the bitmap version of the font and replaced the FOND
with the FOND from a copy of Times. I then used Fedit to replace the word
times in the fond with the name of my font. Finally, I made a copy of the
downloadable postscript and changed the composite font name to be Times-Bold
and gave it the correct name for the Mac to find when it searched for it
(BlahBol).

After reading the Apple LaserWriter reference I can't understand how your
editing of the data fork worked. There are nasty offsets in the FOND
definition that will get screwed up if you mess around with editing it
directly. Given that both Fontographer and Fontastic Plus know how to create
FOND resources and that editing them is sort of important to be able to create
font families (which they mention) you'ld think that at least Fontographer had
such a feature...

Thanks for the help, I'll try out what you suggest and see if it leads anywhere...


Alex Heatley                                Computing Services Centre
Domain: alex@rata.vuw.ac.nz                 Victoria University of Wellington
Path: ...!uunet!vuwcomp!rata!alex           P.O Box 600, New Zealand.
Trolls can often be found under bridges ... or in Computing Departments.

pool@blake.acs.washington.edu (Jonathan Pool) (12/14/88)

After further experimentation I have gotten bizarre behavior from my
ResEdit'ed composite font families, including wrong spacing in other
than Roman styles and disappearing characters.  Altsys sells a program
called Family Builder for $100, which it insists will facilitate all
the things we are trying to do.  It requires that one use bitmap files
of the various styles that one wants to build into a family.  Adobe sells
the bitmap files (under the name "Macintosh screen fonts") for all
LaserWriter II fonts in all resident styles for $50 (including US
shipping).  Adobe also sends people for free a disk containing all these
fonts' AFM files.  The fonts distributed with the Macintosh are not
identical, even in the Roman styles, with Adobe's, and this leads to
messy results when Fontographer uses the Adobe AFM files to construct
bitmaps from an Apple font opened as a composite source.  According to
Altsys, the results will be correct when Adobe's fonts are used.  I have
ordered Family Builder and the Adobe fonts.  Altsys also says the $0800
Fontographer puts into a FOND as its first word means (contrary to
Apple's documentation) that all justification space adjustments will
be made inter-word rather than also intra-word, and that one can change
this word to $1000, which Apple's FOND's use, to permit both kinds of
justification adjustment.  Complete and consistent documentation is
obviously not yet at hand.