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From: pool@blake.acs.washington.edu (Jonathan Pool)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Creating Overlay Fonts Using Fontographer
Keywords: Fonts, Laserwriter, Postscript
Message-ID: <382@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Date: 13 Dec 88 16:27:26 GMT
References: <14403@comp.vuw.ac.nz> <330@blake.acs.washington.edu> <14426@comp.vuw.ac.nz>
Reply-To: pool@blake.acs.washington.edu (Jonathan Pool)
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 22


After further experimentation I have gotten bizarre behavior from my
ResEdit'ed composite font families, including wrong spacing in other
than Roman styles and disappearing characters.  Altsys sells a program
called Family Builder for $100, which it insists will facilitate all
the things we are trying to do.  It requires that one use bitmap files
of the various styles that one wants to build into a family.  Adobe sells
the bitmap files (under the name "Macintosh screen fonts") for all
LaserWriter II fonts in all resident styles for $50 (including US
shipping).  Adobe also sends people for free a disk containing all these
fonts' AFM files.  The fonts distributed with the Macintosh are not
identical, even in the Roman styles, with Adobe's, and this leads to
messy results when Fontographer uses the Adobe AFM files to construct
bitmaps from an Apple font opened as a composite source.  According to
Altsys, the results will be correct when Adobe's fonts are used.  I have
ordered Family Builder and the Adobe fonts.  Altsys also says the $0800
Fontographer puts into a FOND as its first word means (contrary to
Apple's documentation) that all justification space adjustments will
be made inter-word rather than also intra-word, and that one can change
this word to $1000, which Apple's FOND's use, to permit both kinds of
justification adjustment.  Complete and consistent documentation is
obviously not yet at hand.