[comp.sys.next] Non-roman fonts

dcarpent@sjuphil.uucp (D. Carpenter) (10/22/90)

After reading a post from Jacob Gore about his success in
getting Cyrillic third-party fonts to work on the NeXT, I
decided to write to a supplier of Indic fonts--Ecological Linguistics
in Washington, D.C.--to inquire about fonts for the NeXT.  
This company has a large selection of non-Roman fonts.

In reply they said that they were unfamiliar with the NeXT, but
that if I wished to try the "mfrc" program written by Mark Harris
(which I had mentioned to them) to try and get them running,
I was welcome to.  

They also noted the need for adequate keyboard software to access
the fonts, and said that if I could obtain information on how to
produce novel "dead-key" combinations and key sequences that yield
single codes on the NeXT, they might be able to work something out.

I have a few questions, then:

1.  where can I find the needed information on keyboard mapping on
the NeXT?  How flexible is it?  I've had NO experience with this 
sort of thing, so even the most basic information would probably
be helpful.

2.  Has anyone had experience with Mark Harris's "Macintosh Font
Resource Converter" which he posted to comp.sys.next last July?
I would hate to spend $120 on a font only to find it is unuseable.

3.  Do other people have a need for non-standard fonts (i.e., things
that go beyond the ISOLatin1 supported in 2.0)?  While at EDUCOM'90
last week I spoke to a programmer at NeXT about the need for such
fonts on the Cube, and he suggested that since the porting of fonts
that one already owns to another postscript machine woould be a
trivial task, it might be possible to convince a font company to
do just that, even if there were initially only a fairly small number
of people interested.  Are others interested?  Would it be worthwhile
approaching Ecological Linguistics (or others) about this?  Has
anyone already done so?  Or does anyone know of an alternative?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-- 
===============================================================
David Carpenter            dcarpent@sjuphil.UUCP                    
St. Joseph's University    dcarpent@sjuphil.sju.edu
Philadelphia, PA  19131   

tsui@copper.ucs.indiana.edu (Yufeng Tsui) (10/22/90)

In article <1990Oct22.004445.599@sjuphil.uucp> dcarpent@sjuphil.UUCP () writes:
| 2.  Has anyone had experience with Mark Harris's "Macintosh Font
| Resource Converter" which he posted to comp.sys.next last July?
| I would hate to spend $120 on a font only to find it is unuseable.

Most of the fonts works. (I tried 20 and 4 of them did not work.  They
are Adobe Optima Family).  I also tried some PD created by
fontgraph2.3. I can display the fonts but can not print.  Someone sent
me one created by fontgraph3.x (I forgot that guy's name) and it did
work fine.  However, keyboard mapping is different as expected.
So I assume most Type 1 fonts can be ported to NeXT without a lot of
trouble.

--yufeng
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Yufeng Tsui, UCS of Indiana University. Bloomington , IN  47405      UU II UU
{att,ames,rutgers,purdue}!iuvax!copper!tsui                           U II U
tsui@indiana.edu, tsui@wood1.ucs.indiana.edu (NeXT mail)              U II U
tsuiy@iubacs.bitnet (forwarded)                                         UU
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