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From: alex@rata.vuw.ac.nz (Alex Heatley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Creating Overlay Fonts Using Fontographer
Keywords: Fonts, Laserwriter, Postscript
Message-ID: <14426@comp.vuw.ac.nz>
Date: 4 Dec 88 18:41:17 GMT
References: <14403@comp.vuw.ac.nz> <330@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Sender: news@comp.vuw.ac.nz
Reply-To: alex@rata.vuw.ac.nz (Alex Heatley)
Organization: Computing Serv. Ctr, Victoria Uni., Wellington, New Zealand
Lines: 40

In article <330@blake.acs.washington.edu> pool@blake.acs.washington.edu (Jonathan Pool) writes:
>I called Altsys with the same question and they told me it was absolutely
>impossible to do, unless one has the bitmap fonts for the nonroman
>LW fonts.  But I tried just editing the name of the PS base font, which
>appears once near the end of the downloadable font file's data fork.
>This worked.  So it is definitely possible.  How to make it easy and
>elegant I don't yet know, but my guess is that one should manufacture
>bold, italic, etc. bitmap fonts with FONTastic Plus based on the Roman
>bitmap font that is furnished; then edit the FOND style mapping table
>(APDA sells the book "Apple LaserWriter Reference", which explains the
>format of this table) to identify the bitmap and PostScript fonts in
>the family, and then use Fontographer to edit the bold etc. fonts as
>one normally would.  Altsys also told me that the information about this
>(alleged) impossibility, which should have been in the Fontographer
>manual, is instead in the manual for another Altsys product, Keymaster.

Thanks for the help. I did manage to solve the problem, but it's a real hack.
What I did was choose a name for my font that was the same length as the word
"Times" I then when into the bitmap version of the font and replaced the FOND
with the FOND from a copy of Times. I then used Fedit to replace the word
times in the fond with the name of my font. Finally, I made a copy of the
downloadable postscript and changed the composite font name to be Times-Bold
and gave it the correct name for the Mac to find when it searched for it
(BlahBol).

After reading the Apple LaserWriter reference I can't understand how your
editing of the data fork worked. There are nasty offsets in the FOND
definition that will get screwed up if you mess around with editing it
directly. Given that both Fontographer and Fontastic Plus know how to create
FOND resources and that editing them is sort of important to be able to create
font families (which they mention) you'ld think that at least Fontographer had
such a feature...

Thanks for the help, I'll try out what you suggest and see if it leads anywhere...


Alex Heatley                                Computing Services Centre
Domain: alex@rata.vuw.ac.nz                 Victoria University of Wellington
Path: ...!uunet!vuwcomp!rata!alex           P.O Box 600, New Zealand.
Trolls can often be found under bridges ... or in Computing Departments.