[comp.sys.mac] Word 3.01 font funnies: is there a fix?

kevin@kosman.UUCP (Kevin O'Gorman) (05/15/88)

I have been making up some "font sample" documents in Word, and ran into
some real oddities with the BostonII and Venice fonts.  I was doing this
in order to figure out which fonts I want to keep around, since I just
got a whole big bunch of PD and shareware fonts, and I like to keep
my font setup fairly sane, but reasonably full.

Anyway, I found that BostonII seemed okay until it printed (on a LaserWriter
Plus, as it happens), at which time the bold and bold-italic versions got
screwy, all smushed together as if the printer were spacing over just a
point or so after printing each one.

On the other hand, venice seemed okay until I loaded up some larger point
sizes of the font.  Suddenly I could get only a couple of characters on a
line, as if it was counting each character as if it were many picas wide,
although the actual spacing as printed was okay.

I remade the document in MacWrite, which I don't use much but have around
from the old days when it was bundled with this beast.  All the funny
behaviour went away.

Is this really a Word bug, or something else?  Is there a fix?

chow@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Christopher Chow) (05/18/88)

In article <393@kosman.UUCP> kevin@kosman.UUCP (Kevin O'Gorman) writes:
|...
|Anyway, I found that BostonII seemed okay until it printed (on a LaserWriter
|Plus, as it happens), at which time the bold and bold-italic versions got
|screwy, all smushed together as if the printer were spacing over just a
|point or so after printing each one.
|...
|On the other hand, venice seemed okay until I loaded up some larger point
|sizes of the font.  Suddenly I could get only a couple of characters on a
|line, as if it was counting each character as if it were many picas wide,
|although the actual spacing as printed was okay.
|
|Is this really a Word bug, or something else?  Is there a fix?

Actually, this is a problem with the BostonII and Venice fonts.  It seems
that many of the older fonts were not created correctly.  More specifically,
in many such fonts the fractional spacing information contain garbage.

You'll get similar results on screen if you tried to use BostonII/Venice on
more modern programs which use fractional information for truer WYSIWYG
displays.  These programs include PageMaker 3.0, Xpress, and FullWrite.  In
fact, if you try to install PageMaker 3.0, it'll warn you about bad fonts.

Now, the big question is, how do you go about fixing the bogus fractional
width information?

Christopher Chow
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