wnp@dcs.UUCP (Wolf N. Paul) (10/22/88)
For the past few months, Microsoft has been offering a free Bitstream Installation Kit with the Dutch (Times Roman) and Swiss (Helvetica) outlines to purchasers of MS Word 4.0. Needing several foreign-language fonts, and being aware that the Bitstream outlines contain a total of about 560 different characters, we were hoping to build our fonts from this Installation Kit. Unfortunately, when the Kit arrived, we discovered that it came with three pre-defined character sets ( 7-bit ASCII, MS Windows ANSI, HP Roman8, and Postscript Standard), and no way to define your own character set. A call to Bitstream revealed that this is intentional; if you want that capability, as well as information on which characters have which code in the outlines, you need to buy your Installation Kit from SoftCraft (of Fancy Font fame) -- they are the only ones who provide access to ALL of the characters in the outlines. Well, that did not satisfy me, and after a day of looking at the various files in the Kit with "strings" and "od" (UNIX utilities) I produced both a chart showing what characters there are in the outlines, and what their code numbers are (they are not numbered consecutively, there are large holes or gaps in the sequence of numbers), as well as a little utility which creates a Character Set Description file from a simple text file listing the characters you want to have in the font. There are still a number of items in a CSD file which I do not understand, but even without that, MKCSD works fine for producing HP Softfont compatible fonts. There may be some problems when using it with PostScript devices, or there may be some info it's not putting into the MS WORD .PRN file that's generated, but there are other utilities available in the public domain which should provide workarounds for any such problems. I plan to send the source for the MKCSD utility to comp.sources.misc, as well as post it to GEnie, CompuServe, and the EXEC-PC BBS. The chart showing what characters are contained in the Bitstream outlines is available from me by US-Mail by sending me a self-addressed, stamped envelope with the notation "BS Chart" in the lower right corner. Wolf -- Wolf N. Paul * 3387 Sam Rayburn Run * Carrollton TX 75007 * (214) 306-9101 UUCP: killer!dcs!wnp ESL: 62832882 DOMAIN: dcs!wnp@killer.dallas.tx.us TLX: 910-380-0585 EES PLANO UD