ttp@beta.lanl.gov (T T Phillips) (10/28/88)
I use soft fonts in an HP LaserJet II with a PC compatible to produce overhead slides. An annoying problem is that the soft fonts do not include "bullets" which I like to use to emphasize main points. I would like to know if anyone knows of any soft font character editors that I could use to 1) replace the soft font character for (e.g.) grave accent with the character for lower case "o" and, 2) then edit the new grave accent character to fill in the center. I would envision displaying the character on the screen, using cursor keys or the mouse to guide the cursor to specific dots in the character and then hitting, e.g., + or - to turn on and off that dot. An ideal implementation would include a command to automatically download the font to the printer and print a test copy of the font. If soft font editors are not available, I would appreciate someone directing me to a reference that describes the encoding of soft font characters so that I could write bare bones version of an editor myself. Thanks for any information you can offer me. Terry Phillips Los Alamos National Laboratory ttp@beta.lanl.gov
jcmorris@mitre-bedford.ARPA (Joseph C. Morris) (11/01/88)
In article <22159@beta.lanl.gov> ttp@beta.lanl.gov (T T Phillips) writes: >I use soft fonts in an HP LaserJet II [...] I >would like to know if anyone knows of any soft font character editors >that I could use to 1) replace the soft font character for (e.g.) >grave accent with the character for lower case "o" and, 2) then edit >the new grave accent character to fill in the center. There are several products on the market which allow you to edit the HP-style soft fonts. SoftCraft has two editors: EFONT and (I think) Publisher's Typefoundry. EFONT is part of the Laser Fonts package and isn't interactive: you turn characters into character files (asterisk for one-bits) which you can edit with your favorite text editor and then return into the font. PT is a Windows product which provides for interactive editing using a graphics display. I run EFONT (mainly because I found a copy (still sealed) of the Laser Fonts package for $20 at a flea market); it's creaky but does the job. PT is expensive ($300 price range, I think) but the PC Magazine review gave it high marks. Not too many mail order houses seem to admit that they carry SoftCraft products, but I've seen them advertised occasionally at about 30% off list.