Porterhouse font as TrueType or OpenType

My name is Graham Bartram, I designed the Porterhouse font in RiscOS when I worked at the BBC, to get round the fact that the font rendering would only do anti-aliased fonts, and on our low res monitors of the 1980’s these didn’t look as clear as they would now.

Sadly I no longer have access to an Archimedes and seeing that Porterhouse is still included in RiscOS I was wondering if anyone knows how to convert it into TrueType or OpenType format? I’d love to have it in my font collection again, just for old time’s sake. I can’t even find any images on the web of it in use, presumably because it predates the internet.

Any help appreciated,

Thanks,

Graham

I believe Dr Fonty can do it on a RISC OS based machine (or at least it can convert it into a format which can then be converted via an online converter to TrueType).

Obviously you would need access to a RISC OS machine to do this. I don’t have the means myself unfortunately otherwise I would have offered to do it for you.

Obviously you would need access to a RISC OS machine to do this.

Emulated: RPCEmu

Unfortunately I don’t have access to a working RISC OS machine. I do have an original grey metal Archimedes prototype in storage, but as it hasn’t been turned on for over 30 years it would need to be re-capped before it would be used. It may also still be running Arthur rather than RISC OS!

Does anyone have a RISC OS machine and Dr Fonty who could convert Porterhouse into TrueType for me?

Demo versions from the ADPL site of !Dr Fonty 1.42d 9th June 1999 and !FontFiend 2.43d 9th June 1999 both fail to do much with PortrHouse.

29 Mar 08:18:23 100 ***Error***
29 Mar 08:18:23 100   Title    : Error from Dr†Fonty
29 Mar 08:18:23 100   Task     : Dr†Fonty
29 Mar 08:18:23 100   Message  :    This font has unstable scaffolds. Do you want to continue loading it without scaffolds?
29 Mar 08:18:23 100
29 Mar 08:18:25 100 ***Error***
29 Mar 08:18:25 100   Title    : Error from Dr†Fonty
29 Mar 08:18:25 100   Task     : Dr†Fonty
29 Mar 08:18:25 100   Message  : Division by zero
29 Mar 08:18:25 100
29 Mar 08:18:51 100 ***Error***
29 Mar 08:18:51 100   Title    : Error from FontFiend
29 Mar 08:18:51 100   Task     : FontFiend
29 Mar 08:18:51 100   Message  :    This font has unstable scaffolds. Do you want to continue loading it without scaffolds?
29 Mar 08:18:51 100
29 Mar 08:18:54 100 ***Error***
29 Mar 08:18:54 100   Title    : Error from FontFiend
29 Mar 08:18:54 100   Task     : FontFiend
29 Mar 08:18:54 100   Message  :    This font has a design size of 0 do you want the font scaled to a design size of 1000
29 Mar 08:18:54 100
29 Mar 08:18:59 100 ***Error***
29 Mar 08:18:59 100   Title    : Error from FontFiend
29 Mar 08:18:59 100   Task     : FontFiend
29 Mar 08:18:59 100   Message  :  at 34281Division by zero(34281)
29 Mar 08:18:59 100

Doth demo’s, which have saving disabled, are a bit last century, there may be later versions. Both demo’s are wrapped BASIC starting up on both the Titanium and OS4.39

Other fonts do load satisfactorily.

On the other hand there has been some success previously.

https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19328

https://www.freelists.org/post/davidpilling/3-Easy-RISC-OS-fonts-to-TrueType-ttf-OpenType-otf

(Might be worth asking on stardot.)

My !XP1FontEd ( http://clive.semmens.org.uk/RISCOS/XP1FontEd.html ) can generate SFD (Spline Font Database) files that you can import into FontForge on other platforms. FontForge will then produce TruType or PostScript fonts for you.

I’d offer to do it for you, but I’ve just discovered that my new Mac won’t let me run FontForge – says it can’t guarantee it’s free of malware, and won’t let me override that. Ummm…

!XP1FontEd

Error from XP1FontEd: XP1FontEd error: File 'RAM::RamDisc0.$.Portrhouse.Standard.Outlin*' not found (@ line 2970, no. 214)

Off Topic. To start FontForge on the Mac (Intel) right click in the app the Open it anyway.

there may be later versions

I have version 2.45m of FontFiend and 1.44 of DrFonty and neither will load Porthouse.

Firstly DrFonty complains of unstable scaffolds and on selecting continue then complains that various characters are corrupt.

FontFiend is similar.

I tried !XP1FontED and get the same werror message.

Other fonts work OK with DrFonty/FontFiend.

Does loading PortrHouse into FontED then saving help? I get something that will load into Dr Fonty but as I cannot save from that I cannot go further.

Error from XP1FontEd: XP1FontEd error: File ‘RAM::RamDisc0.$.Portrhouse.Standard.Outlin*’ not found (@ line 2970, no. 214)

Interesting! I’ll look into that.

To start FontForge on the Mac (Intel) right click in the app the Open it anyway.

Used to be able to do that on earlier MacOS, doesn’t work any more (Big Sur (Intel) or Monterey (M1)). Not that one can “right click” on a trackpad – two- or three-finger click doesn’t do anything.

Update: I think I’ve found how to fix the Mac problem – will report when I’ve followed that through. Also will report on the strange error on XP1FontEd – I’ve got an idea what that might be, but I’m not at the Pi at the moment.

Yup. Have to go to System Preferences, Security & Privacy, and allow font forge individually – no simple right click any longer! But yes, I’ve got Font Forge on the Big Sur laptop now. Don’t know whether it’ll run on the M1 or not, but that doesn’t really matter. Now for that strange Pi issue…

A while back I offered to do some 32 bit conversions, for free of course.
Never had a reply.

Now the ADPL site has gone, I think we may have to count the software that was there (ADPL, iSV, and the Clares that never actually got released) as potentially lost…

Does loading PortrHouse into FontED then saving help?

Yes load into FontED and then save the Outlines and IntMetrics allows it to load in to DrFonty.

Scaffolding integrity then checks OK in DrFonty.

Update: I can also save from DrFonty 1.44

I have converted the font using Font2u.com to ttf.

Update:For test purposes I have also converted it back via TTF2f.

I guess there is an element of copyright here that needs confirming/sorting but for test purposes it should be OK to check it is possible.

OK so the converted font via TTF2f doesn’t display in RISCOS do I guess back to the drwing board :-)

Ever had one fo those days :-)

So it appears that now loading the cleaned up Portrhouse, by using FontED , in to DrFonty doesn’t allow any Fonts/Characters to be displayed.

I’m sure it worked but at least the errors on loading in to DrFonty have gone :-)

Oh dear!! A quick look shows that the FontED saved files are too small! Empty! They don’t print from RISC OS.

Everything except PortrHouse

marutan-riscos-free-fonts

acorn2sfd

ubuntu acorn2sfd

Hmm!!

Wasn’t Porterhouse a bitmap, not outline, font?

I think you’ve sussed it, Stuart.

https://gitlab.riscosopen.org/RiscOS/Sources/SystemRes/Fonts/-/tree/master/Portrhouse/Standard

No “outlines” file, but an “x90y45” file, which implies it’s a bitmap font aimed at TV resolution (2:4, like MODE 12) displays.

Unless there is an outline version around some place (maybe the very originals?), I don’t think a conversion to something like TrueType is possible, because this is more like the old .fon file than the .ttf fonts.

Graham, do you recall how you created the font?

That would certainly explain Dave Pitt’s error from my !XP1FonEd – if it’s a bitmap font, there isn’t an Outlin* file for XP1FontEd to find…

(I’ve not been on the Pi yet…)

It’s a long time ago, but I seem to remember designing it in an Archimedes-based font designer tool that used outlines, but having to design it so that all the edges were on pixels boundaries when rendered at a particular font size, so that it didn’t anti-alias. It was deliberately designed to look like a bitmap, but was actually a vector-based font. Maybe Acorn changed the font system to allow bitmap only fonts and then dropped the vector version of Porterhouse, only keeping the bitmap?

Many thanks to all of you who are trying to solve what I thought would be a fairly easy request :-)

Failing an outline version could someone create a bitmap image with all the characters in it so I could recreate it using a Mac font editor? PNG or GIF would be preferred.

It wouldn’t be all that difficult to write an input routine for XP1FontEd to produce an outline font from a bitmap one – whether the effort would be worth it for one font, I’m not sure, but there’s at least two. I might have a look at that, it’s something that’s in my area of competence (so many things that would be useful in RISCOS aren’t…)