HAA!! No more font converter! It's a catastrophy!!

A few weeks ago I posted a message in which I indicated I was looking for Saxonscript and nobody answered.

Saxonscript was a nice postscript interpreter and in this regard can probably be replaced with Turbo Print.

However, Saxonscript did have a small incredibly useful application included with it that seems to have no equivalent anywhere. This application was called GetFont and it had an incredibly useful purpose - it translated ANY Adobe Type 1 font (from the Mac or the PC) into an Amiga bitmap font with the size of your choosing and it did an incredibly good job at it because it used postscript hintings.

Now, I am rebuilding an A3000 lately and equipped it decently. However, it seems all the beautiful fonts I used in my workbench a decade ago are now lost forever.

I have thousands of fonts that convert beautifully into truetype in Windows XP but I no longer have the software that allowed me to use them on the Amiga and no substitute whatsoever to redo the conversion.

Come on! This can't be true! Somebody somewhere must have come up with a solution to bring nice fonts to the Amiga?!?

Just so you know, I have OS3.9 running on my machine now.

[motorollin]

There is software on Aminet which will let you use TrueType fonts on your Amiga. Does this help at all?

--
moto

motorollin wrote:
There is software on Aminet which will let you use TrueType fonts on your Amiga. Does this help at all?

--
moto

Truly, I couldn't tell you. Something like access to fonts is something so fundamental in an OS, that I never expected nobody in the Amiga community to care about it.

Windows, no matter how much we love to hate it, has built-in support for Type1 and Truetype fonts and this is essentially what makes applications such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, QuakXpress and pretty much any web creation/printing applications possible.

The fact that it is not integrated in OS 3.1 or 3.5 or 3.9 is something I must admit I find completely jaw dropping.

Somehow, I expected that after all these years, the old situation on the Amiga where every applications like word processors and DTP softwares each having their own way of managing the outline fonts and feuding with each other to impose their standard was over.

Well, that's truly one fundamental function of Amiga OS that's missing. This is truly awful.

[mr_a500]

Relax. There's a Postscript Type 1 font to Amiga bitmap converter here (http://aminet.net/package/util/libs/Type1Engine) and a Truetype font engine here (http://aminet.net/package/util/libs/ttengine-68k).

I use Postscript fonts on my A500 all the time.

mr_a500 wrote:
Relax. There's a Postscript Type 1 font to Amiga bitmap converter here (http://aminet.net/package/util/libs/Type1Engine) and a Truetype font engine here (http://aminet.net/package/util/libs/ttengine-68k).

I use Postscript fonts on my A500 all the time.

Thanx!

I was starting to think the Amiga was a fontless computer!

Type1engine seems to require MUI 3.8 but I guess the shareware version is enough for my needs.

[leirbag28]

@eslapion


You are completely right...............for years I have suffered having no good fonts.

Somehow I sense that what Mr_a500 suggested is not what you are looking for.

Those programs only let you use the actual Postscript Fonts and TrueType fonts............I got the impression you wanted to convert them into Amiga Bitmap Fonts.

Well indeed there is a few ways to do it.

TypeSmith 2.0 is one such program! I have it....but have no clue how to do the conversions.

There is also FontGrabber which I got off some Magazine disk or CD.........Basically you can Type all the fonts out on the PC and save the Fonts all on one page as a JPEG or whatever....then with Font Grabber you can grab them and save each as a Color Font or plain Font. I personally recommend as a Color Font so that you can use the antialias aound the edges for programs such as SCALA MM300. But then again you can ad antialias with SCALA.

Nevertheless...this program has not functioned for me.......maybe its because of OS3.9? and TypeSmith seems to be Superb.......but I don't know how to use it.

Heck I don't even know what the heck PostScript Fonts are or mean. I don't understand the concept.

I dont know enough.............al I know is that I want PC fonts on my darn Amiga as a Bitmap Font.

[jmbattle]

TTFlib (Aminet) also includes a small command line program to convert an installed truetype font into an Amiga bitmap font at specified sizes (the larger the better).

Kind regards,
James
x

[mr_a500]

Somehow I sense that what Mr_a500 suggested is not what you are looking for.

Those programs only let you use the actual Postscript Fonts and TrueType fonts............I got the impression you wanted to convert them into Amiga Bitmap Fonts.

The link I gave (Type1Engine) does convert Postscript(Adobe) Type 1 Fonts to Amiga Bitmap Fonts. I've used it many times, so I know what it does. I think that's what he's looking for.

I thought the TTEngine program also allowed you to convert to bitmap, but it looks like it doesn't. It just allows programs to use the TrueType fonts. (I don't use TrueType on my Amiga, so I never fully tested it)

It's possible to convert TrueType to Type1 (http://aminet.net/package/text/font/ttf2pt13.3.4), then use Type1Engine to convert to Amiga Bitmap, but I don't know how good a "double conversion" would be. It's probably best to check out the TTFlib that jmbattle suggested.

[Crumb]

Maybe DynaCAD

[ChaosLord]

I bought SaxonScript Professional for $300.00 when it first came out. Unfortunately it did not work for me as well as the free Post v1.86 from Aminet.

You can convert PostScript and TrueType fonts into each other or into Amiga bitmap fonts quite easily using TypeSmith.

Amiga has had PostScript support since waaaaay back in the early 90's. Didn't you use PageStream? It always had great PostScript font support.

I used to be really into PostScript fonts. I used to write code directly in PostScript to control Laser Printers for business automation using Amigas.

ChaosLord wrote:
I bought SaxonScript Professional for $300.00 when it first came out. Unfortunately it did not work for me as well as the free Post v1.86 from Aminet.


I downloaded post186 from aminet and I suspect it can do a lot of the goodies that Saxonscript did.

When Saxonscript first came out, I also bought it and it was just full of bugs that made it rather unfunctional but since there was a phone number to the company on the back of the package, I contacted them and they sent me an update that fixed just about every problems with it.

Unfortunately, the fact that these bugs essentially made the "on the shelf" product rather useless, people didn't bother investigate like I did. The product's reputation very quickly became a negative one and the company faded into oblivion.

leirbag28 wrote:
@eslapion

...

Heck I don't even know what the heck PostScript Fonts are or mean. I don't understand the concept.

I dont know enough.............al I know is that I want PC fonts on my darn Amiga as a Bitmap Font.


Truetype and Adobe Type 1 fonts both qualify as "outline fonts".

Outline fonts are fonts that define letters and numbers and symbols (and whatever else) as coordinates where lines, circles, curves, etc... instead of ordinary pixels are drawn. This means, no matter how small or large your fonts are, the resolution of the output device always defines the size of a pixel.

This way, if you use a 600 dpi printer to draw a huge 8 inch tall letter A, the pixels don't get scaled up and your letter A will have 8x600=4800 pixels in height.

Example of ITC Garamond Adobe Type 1 used to reproduce the original AMIGA logotype here: http://www.amiga.org/gallery/photo.php?lid=3292

[Iggy_Drougge]

eslapion wrote:

Windows, no matter how much we love to hate it, has built-in support for Type1 and Truetype fonts and this is essentially what makes applications such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, QuakXpress and pretty much any web creation/printing applications possible.


Actually, DTP programs tend to use their own font routines because they are made entirely for typography. Quark Xpress has been in a lot of trouble, though, because it relied so heavily on the Quickdraw OS functions in old Mac systems.

Iggy_Drougge wrote:

Actually, DTP programs tend to use their own font routines because they are made entirely for typography. Quark Xpress has been in a lot of trouble, though, because it relied so heavily on the Quickdraw OS functions in old Mac systems.

Starting with Windows NT 3.5, equivalent routines were available on the PC. That's why the first version of Xpress for Windows REQUIRED Win32c to run under Windows 3.1. The same was true of Photoshop 3.0 and Illustrator 7.0.

May I remind you that Netscape Navigator first ran on NT 3.5 before Windows 95 existed for similar reasons. Windows 3.1 had miserable font support.

What this means: It's not Xpress that was in trouble, its windows because it didn't support outline fonts originally.