lotto@midas.harvard.edu (Gerald I. Lotto) (06/07/89)
Recently, we started to write a UIS driver for an organic chemistry VMS application under development here. One thing that we quickly discovered is that the fixed-width fonts distributed with VWS scale to a width of 14 units (a requirement of the program) very badly. Looking at all of the fonts on our system (4.7A) we found a few RCOURIR* fonts that looked good at this size and went to work. Now I have noticed that these fonts are not on all machines with VWS installed. In fact, there appears to be variation according to VWS version, additional software installed and VMS version. Ideally, we would like to use a font with the program that all installations will have AND that looks decent. One possible solution is to distribute one with the program itself. Now my questions: 1) May we redistribute any DEC fonts? (I assume the answer here is no, but it can't hurt to ask, who knows where they got thier fonts?) 2) Are there PD fonts that can be converted to the correct format and distributed? 3) Is the "correct" format the same for VMS 4.x vs 5.x, VWS 2.x vs 3.x, and different hardware configurations ($FONT vs $VAFONT)? 4) Where (is this|are these) format(s) documented? 5) What is required to get the system to use a font in a disk area other than SYS$FONT? (This can be solved trivially by experimentation, but I was hoping to find out if it is recommended for or against) 6) Are there examples of other programs that have dealt with this problem that we can look at? Thanks for any and all help. Please respond via e-mail, I will summarize to the net if I get any requests to do so. J (lotto@lhasa.harvard.edu) -- Gerald Lotto - Harvard Chemistry Dept.