Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att-cb!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!mcnc!xanth!kent
From: kent@xanth.cs.odu.edu (Kent Paul Dolan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Fonts on the Amiga
Summary: 1) no extra info, 2) not the first
Keywords: Fonts
Message-ID: <4640@xanth.cs.odu.edu>
Date: 27 Mar 88 15:46:14 GMT
References: <3000@gryphon.CTS.COM>
Reply-To: kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan)
Organization: Old Dominion University, Norfolk Va.
Lines: 36

In article <3000@gryphon.CTS.COM> richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard
Sexton) writes: 
>But why only support for fixed space fonts ?
>
>Proportional fonts work most of the time when used strictly for output,
>such as directory listings, but when backspacing on a cli line or 
>when used in an editor (Z for example) behavior, although predictable,
>is undesirable. 
>
>Yes, this would require keeping around more information per character
>than now, [...]

Well, no, no extra information.  If you know from the font how wide
the character was when writing it going to the right, then you can
look at the same information to figure out how big a blank space to
write going to the left.  You do still have the ASCII code for the
character in the file you're editing, so you know what you are about
to delete, right?  The font table is still around for reference?

>The other subject I want to touch on is colorfonts. Color fonts are
>fonts comprised of more than one bitplane.  They were invented by 
>Interactive Softworks, who developed _The Calligrapher_, a font 
>editing program.

Not unless they invented color fonts before 1977, the first time I saw
them used.  Those have been in SIGGRAPH procedings stuff for a long,
long time.  We of ANSI X3H3 decided not to support them, directly as
fonts, in what became the GKS standard, in late 1979 or early 1980,
because they were beyond our charter.

>Comments ?

Well, you asked. ;-)  I restricted this to comp.sys.amiga, 'cause it
is more history lesson than a tech contribution.

Kent, the man from xanth.