ries@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM (Marc Ries) (10/02/90)
My initial reactions to Bitstream's new FaceLift product is less than anticipated -- actually, after five hours of trying to get satisfactory output, FaceLift is beginning to look, feel and smell like cow dung! Shades of SoftType! Actually, after months of frustration, ZSoft has finally gotten most of the bugs out of SoftType to make it usable with Ami Pro. It appears that FaceLift is going to have to go through the same process. The part I don't like is using me as the "I&T" part of the loop. I use Ami Professional. For starters, Bitstream's FaceLift has a known bug in handling Ami screen fonts (but no idea of the problem or of a fix). Secondly, I could not get the Dutch 801 Roman fonts to fill correctly (they all print as a partial outline font -- unless set as "bold" text). Thirdly, some of the sentences are "sliced apart" and offset, resulting in some truely unprofessional output. Now for support. I tried their support number. After waiting twenty minutes on hold, I decide to "leave a message" -- only to be told electronically that that service was not available. After another twenty minutes on hold, a real person. They tell me about the Ami screen bugs and no, they don't have a clue about the "sliced" sentences. They explain that even though the manual goes to great lengths to suggest settings for darkness and resolution for 300x300 laser printers, the tech person says they setting should be left blank. I have yet to see if this solves the one problem. My final opinion based on the initial release of Bitstream's FaceLift, expecially for Ami Pro users, is: don't buy it. TrueType can't be THAT bad.....
limrcd@hpsgm2.sgp.hp.com (Richard Lim) (10/09/90)
Actually, I find Ami Pro's screen font to be very strange. Most font viewers have trouble with it. hDC First Apps and the Windows 3.0 viewers both choke on Ami Pro's screen fonts! Anybody got any ideas. Anyhow, looks like I better hold off on ordering FaceLift. How about Adobe Type Manager for Windows? I am currently using SuperPrint which is super but cannot work with ITC Zapf DingBats from Compugraphics. Ric :-)