[comp.windows.ms] Facelift/Adobe Type Mgr

bollard@hpspkla.spk.hp.com (Lee M. Bollard) (09/25/90)

Does anyone have an opinion as to which product is best for utilizing
a Laserjet (IIP) with Windows?  I'm in need of good font management,
screen fonts included, with minimal disc space.
 
I've heard of Bitstream Facelift and Adobe Type Manager.  I guess these
products fit this description.  Can someone tell me what the differences
are between the two products, and/or which is best and why?


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|                                                                     |
|  Lee Bollard                     unix:  bollard@hpspkla.spk.hp.com  |
|  Hewlett-Packard               HPDesk:  Lee BOLLARD / HP1000/53     |
|  Spokane Division                                                   |
|                                                                     |
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tom@mims-iris.waterloo.edu (Tom Haapanen) (10/02/90)

Lee M. Bollard <bollard@hpspkla.spk.hp.com> writes:
> I've heard of Bitstream Facelift and Adobe Type Manager.  I guess these
> products fit this description.  Can someone tell me what the differences
> are between the two products, and/or which is best and why?

Well, I bought FaceLift without really knowing very much about it -- but
it was only $69 so I thought I'd take a chance.  Anyway, I received it
yesterday, and here are some impressions.

The package includes Swiss and Dutch (yeah, they're Helvetica and Times
Roman, really) in roman, italic, bold and bold italic.  It also includes
Park Avenue, Cooper Black, Brush Script, Formal Script (Ondine) and
Monospace 821 (Helvetica monospace).  All fonts are scalable (yeah!  Love
those 144-point fonts on screen!) and are dumped to the LaserJet in
graphics form.  The package can also pregenerate LaserJet soft fonts from
the outlines for greater speed, and has lots of fine-tuning available.  The
fonts are of high quality (especially on the printer), although the screen
display of the font is somewhat slower than the standard screen fonts.  All
in all, the package seems like an excellent value for $69.

Anyway, I did some performance tests.  I have a 386/25 with a 2MB Smartdrive,
5 MB for Windows and a LaserJet II on parallel port.  I was running in 386
enhanced mode, and spooler priority was set to High.  The two numbers are for
Word for Windows to finish feeding data to the spooler, and for me to get the
last page out of the printer.

1. Two-page resume, four different fonts (including heading font)

	VS Software soft font		40 sec		50 sec
	FaceLift, graphics		50 sec		70 sec

2. One-page letter, one font

	VS Software soft font		 5 sec		13 sec
	FaceLift, graphics		10 sec		25 sec
	FaceLift, pregen soft font	 5 sec		14 sec

So there *is* a significant performance penalty (especialy for documents
with few different fonts), but this can be avoided by pregenerating the
common fonts.  It looks like I'll have the most common fonts preloaded
permanently into the LaserJet, and then have most of the other sizes that
I use regularly pregenerated onto the disk.

Has anyone used ATM yet?

[ \tom haapanen --- university of waterloo --- tom@mims-iris.waterloo.edu ]
[ "i don't even know what street canada is on"               -- al capone ]