[softwarelist] Re: Fonts

  • From: Peter Newble <peter@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: davidpilling@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:34:07 +0000 (GMT)

In article <50d05d0cc7dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Dave Symes
<dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > Thank you, but unfortunately rather a lot of dosh just to
> > > convert a couple of fonts.

In message <50d0605abdcharles@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> charles
<charles@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >  why do RISC OS users expect to get something for nothing?

Quite. £40 is the cost of just a couple of the many more hours
spent developing an invaluable application. The number of
/good-quality/ fonts available in Acorn format is very small, so
effT1T and effTTT are essential tools (and effT1T is infinitely
better than T1ToFont).

Nobody can make a lot of money out of the RISC OS market, so
becomes increasingly important that those who contribute to it
make at least a little out of everything they do. (I feel
strongly about this because the same applies in my own field!)

In article <f30550d150.martinv@xxxxxx>, Martin Vethake
   <martinv@xxxxxx> wrote:
> http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/

That reads Acorn-format fonts (although my experience of it,
admittedly a few years ago, wasn't encouraging) but doesn't write
them, as far as I know.

Ornament fonts such as the one in question are a somewhat special
case. They are far more complex than alphabetic or other symbol
fonts, and such complexity evidently wasn't considered when the
Acorn font manager was devised, c.1991. Don't forget that, in
those days, desktop computers running other OSs didn't rasterise
outline fonts on-the-fly, complete with anti-aliasing etc., as
RISC OS did; they relied on lower-quality bitmaps for screen
display. Rendering such complex glyphs would have been
impracticably slow for any GUI at the time. Away from RISC OS,
rendering outlines was left to the RIP in the (expensive)
Postscript printer or imagesetter, which could devote all its
resources to the task and didn't have the same time constraints.
By the time high-quality on-screen font rendering reached Mac OS
and Windows, the same constraints of time and memory no longer
applied.

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