Font Assistance

Hi everyone,

I’ve been using Acorn computers since the days of my trusty A5000 and recently migrated all my data to a PI 3 running V5.2.4. The speed increase is quite something!

However, I’m opening up some old documents I had that I created in !Impression (can’t remember if it was Junior or Style) and one document I’m attempting to open is complaining that it’s missing a font called “Swiss”, so some of the document doesn’t quite render right.

Most of my floppies have now died, so I don’t have much hope of reclaiming the data off those, wherever this font is.

Anyone any idea how I can get my hands on it? I suspect that it was included as part of the original install to !Impression, but can’t be 100% sure. My memory has faded somewhat, although that’s to be expected after 25-ish years….

Thanks for your help.

Mark.

I don’t have a copy, but it’s likely to be a knock-off of Helvetica, so you could copy Homerton and use that.

Open Resources:$.Fonts.Homerton.Medium and !Boot.Resources.!Fonts. Assuming your !Fonts contains fonts¹ (rather than further font directories) and you’re not using a Messages² file to speed up loading, create a Swiss directory in !Fonts and inside that, a Medium directory. Open the latter.

Now copy IntMetric0 from Homerton, and create a text file containing only the text “Homerton.Medium” and save it as Outlines0 into that directory.

Double-click on !Fonts and you should now have a Swiss font.

You can obviously do the same with all the other styles too.

¹ Back in the days of 77 maximum objects in a directory, a single !Fonts was too restrictive, so I knocked up a system where !Fonts installed all its immediate subdirectories as font directories in their own right. That way I could have thousands of fonts installed. Other people used multiple appdirs, !Fonts2, !Fonts3 etc. Just find where your actual font directories start, it’s probably immediately inside !Fonts.

² When you have thousands of fonts installed, FontManager is very slow to load them, so you can put a Messages file inside (each) font directory listing all the fonts (and their localised name, and the default style for each family). If you do that, it boots much faster, but when you add a new font you have to edit the file or run Some Other Program (not included), so be aware.

If the font directory thing is a bit confusing, here’s a diagram:

Normally:

!Fonts
   |--!Boot
   |--!Run
   |--!Sprites
   |--!Sprites22
   |
   |--AvantGarde
   |      |--Medium
   |      |    |--IntMetrics
   |      |    '--Outlines
   |      '--Oblique
   |           |--IntMetrics
   |           '--Outlines
   |--Swiss
   |    |--IntMetric0
   |    '--Outlines0
   |
   '--Zanzibar
          '--Bold
               |--IntMetrics
               '--Outlines

so !Fonts is your Font Directory, and its subdirectories (AvantGarde, Swiss, Zanzibar) are fonts (which are directories – I know this is confusing).

However, one can also do this:

!Fonts
   |--!Boot
   |--!Run
   |--!Sprites
   |--!Sprites22
   |--!RunImage
   |
   |--BodyFonts
   |      |--AvantGarde
   |      |      |--Medium
   |      |      |    |--IntMetrics
   |      |      |    '--Outlines
   |      |      '--Oblique
   |      |           |--IntMetrics
   |      |           '--Outlines
   |      '--Swiss
   |           |--IntMetric0
   |           '--Outlines0
   |
   '--Decorative
          '--Zanzibar
                '--Bold
                     |--IntMetrics
                     '--Outlines

in which case both BodyFonts and Decorative are Font Directories, both containing fonts.

I am pretty sure “Swiss” was the EFF Helvetica (or Linotype Swiss?) variant from their collection “Professional Typography”. It was almost certainly not one of the Impression fonts.

Not sure what happened with all the EFF stuff after Edward died (I think in 2014).

I am pretty sure “Swiss” was the EFF Helvetica (or Linotype Swiss?) variant from their collection “Professional Typography”.

Exactly. It’s quite a comprehensive family, over 3 Mb in size. If you haven’t already followed Nemo’s advise, I’d be happy to send you a trial copy.

When you have thousands of fonts installed, FontManager is very slow to load them

Something which Nemo probably has ideas about rewriting, but only after finishing (or as the last part of) the Unicode work¹ Busy, busy, busy.
Of course we do have the open question about the relative value of non-standard fonts.

One question Nemo – the !RunImage bit:

However, one can also do this:
!Fonts
|—!Boot
|—!Run
|—!Sprites
|—!Sprites22
|—!RunImage

What’s the !RunImage?

¹ Which he’s working on when the right mood is there – never try to push a techie into doing things when they don’t have the right mindset, things never work out well.

Of course we do have the open question about the relative value of non-standard fonts.

Amen to that. Three or four (or just possibly 5 or 6) non-standard fonts that one particularly wants for some reason, maybe; but thousands? No ta. (I think we had about 30 for the Journal of Physiology and the Journal of Experimental Physiology, but that was in the days when you could only have 223 characters in each font. And they were very careful copies of old metal typefaces, so sort-of standard.)

What’s the !RunImage?

I’ve noticed an issue with FontManager. The Messages file that helps speed up font loading is not created by FontManager, it appears to be created by the font installer. So if you should install/remove fonts manually, reality and the Messages file will be different.
Perhaps it is something to quietly check that (and the validity of the fonts?) in the background?

Amen to that. Three or four (or just possibly 5 or 6) non-standard fonts that one particularly wants for some reason, maybe; but thousands?

I have selection of fonts, maybe fifty in total? Of these, the following are considered “important”:

• Acorn (a bitmap font version of the VDU character set)
• ANSI (a bitmap font version of the PC-ANSI character set)
• Cyberbit (for loads of stuff available via UTF-8 but not in the ROM fonts)
• DPDings (symbols)
• KanaFont (my one, used by !KanaTutor)
• Keyboard (keytops)
• Rick’sFont (font version of my handwriting!)

And some others are nice to have (like Tek, LCDfont, Ladybird…), but probably the rest could be dropped. Sure, it’s not to have a title in Crackling font (looks like it is on fire), but these days sure flights of fancy can cause issues when rendering to PDF. Best to stick with traditional fonts that are widely supported…

Steve asked

One question Nemo – the !RunImage bit

As I said earlier:

so I knocked up a system where !Fonts installed all its
immediate subdirectories as font directories in their own right

Its a short script that FontInstalls¹ each of the subdirectories of !Fonts (instead of !Fonts itself), which would have allowed over 5,000 fonts to be stored inside !Fonts in the old 77 file era. So it turns !Fonts from a Font Directory to a container of Font Directories. Mostly irrelevant now.

Rick said

The Messages file that helps speed up font loading is not created by FontManager

Mr Darren Salt wrote such a nice Font Messages compiler and editor that I didn’t bother writing one myself (there’s no higher praise). Although FontManager could “check” in the background, it seems rather paranoid. The assumption is that if you are using Messages you’re using some kind of font management solution, so FontManager doesn’t have to double-guess that.

Indeed, one may have deliberately removed fonts from the Messages to make them temporarily unavailable. Wouldn’t want FontManager thinking it knew better. I’m in charge here.

One of the nice things about having multiple Font Directories inside !Fonts is that they don’t all have to have a Messages file – the stable ones have one, the ones I muck about with don’t.

Clive the aesthete said

but thousands? No ta.

Meanwhile, back in the newspaper publishing trade of the 80s and 90s… Designers end up with a LOT of fonts.

¹ Actually it definitely does not FontInstall every subdirectory, but instead builds the font path and then does a single FontInstall at the end. FontManager certainly used to leak memory like a garden sprinkler when doing FontInstall, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it still did.

Edit: It still does

There isn’t a single bit of FontManager that isn’t a huge steaming pile o<offline>

Meanwhile, back in the newspaper publishing trade of the 80s and 90s… Designers end up with a LOT of fonts.

All of which tended to be used in groups so that things conformed to a house style.
I believe there’s a good reason for some of those fonts being named Times.something

There isn’t a single bit of FontManager that isn’t a huge steaming pile

Apart from the small fact that it fills a gap caused by the absence of an alternative font handling?

leak memory like a garden sprinkler

Garden sprinklers leak memory? So that’s why my grass turned brown…

It still does

Bug report? We have the sources, so somebody could attempt…

…or at least throw their arms up in horror and flag it WontFix/CantFix/OFFSWhatAHonkingPileOf…
:-)

Meanwhile, back in the newspaper publishing trade of the 80s and 90s… Designers end up with a LOT of fonts.

That may be true, but how many newspapers were routinely laid out with Impression?

Meanwhile, back in the newspaper publishing trade of the 80s and 90s… Designers end up with a LOT of fonts.

That may be true, but how many newspapers were routinely laid out with Impression?

More to the point, as I referenced earlier, how many newspapers used a large number of fonts.
One font in different sizes, bold, italic + combos and then an odd different font for some effect. Hell even the scrappiest bottom feeding tabloids don’t use many to entertain their customers (“readers” is often stretching things)

how many newspapers used a large number of fonts.

I wonder if they needed the various fonts for styles and such in advertising?

I recall a company I used to work at in the early ‘90s, they used to advertise in a magazine. The magazine wanted me to fax (!) advertising copy that I created in Ovation (and sent via ArcFax). The fonts used had to be standard and indicate the face and sizes. This would be followed by a letter that contained a printout and copies of photos that they’d scan and insert.
Luckily lead time was two months.

The irony was that I could scan the photos myself, make them reasonable quality JPEG, and assemble the lot as a PostScript file and I could Zmodem the lot to them, or send it on floppy. But they weren’t that advanced, they didn’t accept PS. So people posted printouts and they laid it out themselves. Made it fun when it came to including logos…

The magazine went bust (gee, I wonder why) and somebody else took over the creation of advertising copy because they knew (Aldus) FrameMaker and didn’t want to learn some weird system. Still, he was a control freak and what I did in an evening took him about three days, so I got some peace. ;-)

how many newspapers used a large number of fonts

Every single one that carried advertising.

Thanks for your help, everyone.

I found what I was after. Many thanks to the person who said it was an EFF font.

I had a search using the Wayback Machine and found the image to the CD that had the font (and a whole pile of others too).

Link here, just in case anyone has a similar issue – https://archive.org/details/cdrom-riscos-eff

Interesting. I had that CD at some point, and used to sell the EFF Font Library, but of course I can’t find a copy now.