Four Apps

I’ve put four applications I’ve written for working on fonts and drawfiles on my website: http://clive.semmens.org.uk/RISCOS/

I published earlier versions of the first three in Acorn User in the late 1990s, under the names Fontician, Embolden and PathWays. I’m now using the XP1 prefix I’ve been allocated. I originally wrote all of them to help with my work producing camera ready copy for scientific journals, but have made various enhancements since.

XP1FontEd is designed to work alongside FontEd, providing various extra facilities – particularly conversion back and forth between drawfiles and fonts, but also converting RISCOS fonts to SFD (Spline Font Database) files for import to FontForge on a PC, to produce TrueType or PostScript fonts.

XP1MBoldn is mainly intended for use with XP1FontEd, to produce emboldened (or thinned) versions of fonts, but has wider uses with drawfiles.

XP1PathEd also has uses in font design and editing, but is of much more general application in drawings. It can enable you to see, and alter, the ‘winding’ of paths in drawfiles, or to cut up paths into their components in various ways, or stitch paths together in various ways – very useful if you need similar shapes in parts of several different paths.

XP1ReDraw allows you to use line patterns not otherwise available in !Draw, and to apply various hatchings and cross-hatchings to rectangles.

Various fonts to come when I’ve brought them up-to-date.

I’m making them all available free of charge, and I’ve no problem with you editing them to your heart’s content and passing them, or edited versions of them, on – but do please (1) let me know of any enhancements (2) keep the little note with my email address in the !Help files (3) feel free to contact me with a view to paying me a little something if you find any of them really useful and can afford it!
(I shan’t think any less of anyone who uses them without paying a little something – I’m a semi-pecunious pensioner myself and don’t often pay for shareware. Let me know if you find any of these useful anyway – feedback is encouraging with or without cash.)

Sorry my website doesn’t work terribly well on NetSurf – the biggest issue is Javascript. I don’t use it much, but I do value the one use I do make of it…would it be worth my while making a special NetSurfable version? I’ve made the RISCOS page usable…

I’ve improved the description of XP1FontEd on my website – it’s actually more capable than I’d originally made it seem in the description! The reason I was looking at the description is that I’m about to make it more capable still…

http://clive.semmens.org.uk/RISCOS/index.php?XP1FontEd

Oh, and there’s no Javascript on my website any longer – I’ve learnt enough PHP to do serverside the things I was using Javascript to do on the client machine. My website is still not 100% NetSurf friendly, but it’s a lot more usable than it was.

!XP1FontEd is indeed now more capable: it now not only preserves the scaffold lines when you export a font to a series of drawfiles, it also preserves the connection of the control points on the glyphs to the scaffold lines. (It disconnects any control point that you move in !Draw, or that lose their relationship to the scaffolding due to rotation or shearing of the glyph – but still preserves any connections that make any logical sense.)

For full details, see the Help file within the application (more detail than on the introductory page on my website):

http://clive.semmens.org.uk/RISCOS/index.php?XP1FontEd

I’ve not crunched the BASIC, and you’re welcome to take a look inside. Especially if you want to see an example of really bad programming. Oh, it works, and as far as I know it’s bug-free (if you come across any, let me know & I’ll fix ‘em). But it’s got exactly one comment in 1,111 lines, many of them with several instructions on a line, and the meaningfulness of the names of variables, procedures and functions isn’t always great. I don’t know whether I’ll ever find time to improve this, which means when I kick the bucket or otherwise give up on it, it’s probably a dead loss. Sorry. Unless of course anyone wants to pay me to spend the time to make it a bit more maintainable. The remarkable thing really is that I can still understand what I did over 20 years ago, well enough to upgrade it…

When I did that upgrade to !XP1FontEd in October 2017, I upset the facility for save SFD files. I presume no-one has tried to use it in the interim – if you did, why didn’t you let me know it was broken? As far as I know everything else !XP1FontEd does continued to work just fine.

Fixed now. Hopefully I’ve not broken anything else fixing this! No problems revealed in a quick check, but I can’t claim to have done exhaustive tests.

Hmm. Still issues with some fonts – doesn’t crash the program, but refuses to produce SFD files directly from the font. Strangely, the same font will convert to a set of draw files, then you can produce the SFD file from the drawfiles no problem. Simple workaround, but would like to know what’s going wrong. Investigating.

Problem identified and mostly fixed. One remaining strangeness – I understand why it’s happening, but haven’t implemented a fix yet, and it’s only strange really: if there are any completely empty chunks in a font, the Draw version (and probably the SFD version, I’ve not checked) of the font contains a copy of the next chunk in the empty chunk. Otherwise everything seems to be working fine.

Strangeness now fixed. !XP1FontEd now believed to be working as intended in every respect – do let me know if you run into any oddities!

Next intended upgrade: accept SFD files as input. No, I don’t intend to accept .ttf, .otf or .otc files – use FontForge (or whatever other app you like or have) on the Foreign Platform to convert them to SFD. No promises about timescale for this upgrade! :-)

I’ve run into oddities myself – SFD conversions of RISCOS fonts are fine for small fonts, and the lower end of bigger ones. Work required to make the rest work properly! Not urgent from my POV.

Font → Drawfile and vice versa and all kinds of tracking, scaling, shearing & rotating work fine on all sizes of font.