Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Does anyone have a suggestion for a font viewer for fonts (especially Type1) that are not installed ?

There's several for fonts that are already installed, but how do you look at an uninstalled font to see if it's something you want to keep ?

Found one program that claims to do that (gfontview) but it's gtk, I'll build that if I have to but would rather not.

Are you looking only for something that can be built on IRIX? If you don't like GTK, are you hoping for a Motif interface?

wenp wrote: Are you looking only for something that can be built on IRIX? If you don't like GTK, are you hoping for a Motif interface?

Thank you, after hours of struggle today it's time to give up on the wonderful Yewnix and do this in Windders, the bazaar is crap. I wasted several hours on this worthless, incompetent, stupid shit. I'll spare you the blow-by-blow.

To save anyone else the same hassle, I'll confirm hamei's opinion. I tried all the font utilities I could find for Linux, but gave up and now I do all my font editing in Windows. Even the free stuff is more stable than anything on Linux.

I still use Altsys Metamorphosis Pro occasionally. It can convert between DPS Type1 and TrueType so you can use it to load pretty much any font (except OpenType) into Irix. It also does previews without installing the font, and can be used as a shortcut to make an .eps from a font (without going through Illustrator).

robespierre wrote: I still use Altsys Metamorphosis Pro occasionally. It can convert between DPS Type1 and TrueType so you can use it to load pretty much any font (except OpenType) into Irix. It also does previews without installing the font, and can be used as a shortcut to make an .eps from a font (without going through Illustrator).

Whoa, cool. Never heard of this one. The olde dayes was best

Meanwhile, back in the modern era, made some discoveries ...

So far, I'm very pleased with the results of ditching the three extra layers of crap that SGI dumped on us post-22. You could mark this down to 'self-fulfilling value judgements' except that I did a few pieces, gave them to the q/a department to check, and her response was "wow ! that's NICE !" And she's a picky ... umm ... person.

On the desktop not so much (altho things do seem snappier) but in printed materials, definitely. Also in desktop display of printed materials (e.g., pdf's), where you aren't getting the bitmap fonts that the locked-in xset fp path gives you. Does anyone know where the hardcoded path hides in irix ?

So my first conclusion was that the real Type1 fonts and DPS that come with pre-22 Irix are noticeably better.

My next conclusion, from diddling around with this, was that Adobe Helvetica is superior to Mickey Arial. And all the other substitutes, same. Side-by-side, the copies just don't cut it.

I wish our printer guys were still hanging out here ... my next conclusion, from looking at a bunch, is that Truetype fonts are not as nice as Type1. Maybe it's the people doing it, maybe it's the format itself, I dunno what, but in general, Type1 fonts look better.

Kinda makes me sad for all the wasted effort, I remember when OS/2 got Truetype drivers and everyone was all excited. It came with Type1. We went backwards, and we were happy about it

Maybe the fact that Adobe hired real type people to create their fonts while Mickey pays five guys, Raj 1 thru 4, $2 a day to make their stuff ... might have something to do with it. All the advertising in the world doesn't make Georgia into a quality typeface. I started out by thinking, "Okay, everyone has Verdana, it's wonderful, so let's convert it to Type1 and use it so all our Mickey customers can have a good experience." But now, sorry, we'll embed a real font into pdf's. Verdana isn't that great. Use your eyes instead of lapping up the boot-licking gush from Ziff-Davis. And Georgia really sucks in comparison to good type.

Also kind of sad but Loonix just doesn't have many font tools. I dragged Fontforge off shithub again, started to build it then threw the piece of garbage away. FUCK, this stuff is crap !!!!!!!! Can't they keep the kindergarteners busy with milk and cookies anymore ?

T1utils is still around, ghostscript has a few tools, and YAY ! there's a new package of tools called "lcdf typetools". This one has some useful stuff. Right now trying some OpenType-to-Type1 conversions. Wish us luck, cuz the Type1 fonts are getting hard to find.

The afm files for all the adobe fonts are available by ftp from their site, by the way. You just have to know the model number of the font, which can be kind of a challenge, but the stuff is still there at least. Yay.

And last but not least, not sure what to do about this but it really looks like the Base PostScript fonts are not the nicest ones in Adobe's drawer. There are several in the same style as Helvetica that have more character, Garamond is kick-ass over Times, New Century Schoolbook, eh, it's okay but ... The advantage of the base fonts is that they are in postscript printers, everyone has them, your work is going to look similar to everyone (but people get what they deserve, if they have the real thing it's going to look better than an Arial substitute) ... but there are nicer fonts in similar styles. Adobe didn't put their best stuff into the dtp world

It seems kind of odd that such a basic thing hasn't been a focus of attention, while Compiz and 3d file managers and all that other useless nonsense get so much press. But get your fonts really figured out and the quality of your output goes up noticeably.

hamei wrote: is that Truetype fonts are not as nice as Type1. Maybe it's the people doing it, maybe it's the format itself, I dunno what, but in general, Type1 fonts look better.

TrueType was solely created to get around Adobe's patent on bezier spline graphics. It never had a technical reason.
Check the Bitstream and ITC libraries, there are a lot of good fonts out there that aren't Adobe.

robespierre wrote: TrueType was solely created to get around Adobe's patent on bezier spline graphics. It never had a technical reason.

<insert nice discussion here about how much companies actually believe in the "imaginary property" myth >

there are a lot of good fonts out there that aren't Adobe.

I'm sure ... just happen to have a ton of Adobe fonts, and they are pretty nice. Also pretty happy with the way things are going - have been successful in re-converting otf's to pfa's (only butcher boys click to their horses), then finding the list of package numbers for the various adobe fonts, then downloading the afm's for them, then the rather complex rites to install in Irix ... but the end result is good. <fontview> works great, just need to find the dev headers for DPS now.

The deeper you get into this, the stranger it becomes. Fonts are never going to look wonderful on-screen with the monitor I am using - it's got not-square pixels. Graphics are super but text is fubar. (Why that would be I have no idear either. Shouldn't graphics want square pixels too ?) But pdf's look excellent. And they look excellent on the Winders box. Viewing the fonts on Winders, they all look the same - crappy. But put them into a pdf and view it, you can see all the little features that separate the good stuffe from the crappe. Really good fonts do make a difference. You would think, "Okay, it's the display engine of the operating system" but then why can pdf's look so much better with the exact same fonts ? Unless Windows is doing behind-your-back substitution. In many cases Irix does, for sure. If it comes across a bitmapped font first with the same name (which DPS requires), then that's what it'll toss on-screen. Which is okay 'cuz we have slow cpu's but .....

Maybe need to rework the bitmap fonts some day ... but quite happy with DPS. And now understand why they ditched Impressario - it's display postscript. Oooh ! Oooh ! Adobe charges money for that !

Yeah well, you want to charge $500 for a $29.95 Adaptec card but think Adobe should get zero ? So we get stuck with that CUPS pile of crap ? Fuck you, SGI.

hamei wrote: But pdf's look excellent. And they look excellent on the Winders box. Viewing the fonts on Winders, they all look the same - crappy.

Antialiasing on Windows was designed to make text crisp and easier to read, so the shape of characters is squeezed to give a greater proportion of solid black/white pixels. On the Mac, they went the opposite direction, keeping the proper geometric form of curves and allowing more gray pixels. So fonts on the Mac have a nicer shape but tend to look fuzzy.

Adobe Reader uses its own display engine, which treats text more like a Mac. If I have some cheap fonts that aren't displaying well on Windows, one workaround is to put them in a PDF and do a screen capture of the display.

wenp wrote: Antialiasing on Windows ... fonts on the Mac have a nicer shape but tend to look fuzzy.

Guess I shoulda asked you first It's even worse than this, really. Windows is the easiest to look at uninstalled fonts - just click the file, very simple. But that doesn't tell you anything, they are so nondescript on Windows that you can barely tell the difference between Gill Sans and Zapf Chancery. Loonix has nothing, in Irix you have to install the fonts before you can see them - not a massive undertaking but still a chore. And the monitor I am using at the moment has non-square pixels, so that's no good either. Plus, fifty cents says that X doesn't display fonts all that well anyhow.

In real life (tm), even though the marketdroids have been chanting "wysiwyg !!" for twenty years, it ain't. Ain't by any stretch of the imagination.

I am guessing there are some typesetting machines that really do display what will be printed ?

For now, easiest to install - exstall is Windows, so install a font of interest, drag a paragraph into word, print it to a paper printer as well as a ps-to-pdf, and look at it as a whole. Lots of times a beautiful "f" doesn't translate into the look you want on a complete page.

Then the Chosen Few go into /usr/lib/DPS/outline/base ...

Adobe Reader uses its own display engine, which treats text more like a Mac. If I have some cheap fonts that aren't displaying well on Windows, one workaround is to put them in a PDF and do a screen capture of the display.

XPDF also looks better than the desktop display, even with rectangular pixels. I wonder how they do that ? But as long as the end result is what I want, I can live with it. Probably have to, unlikely that X is going to re-write their display engine to please me.

Learned a few things along the way so far - one is, it's pretty easy to edit the pfa's and afm's to change the font name. AdobeGaramond I don't mind, but ITCLTMTTimelyNewHeavenetickishProWithExtraGlyphs(c)1989-1993-1997-2003-ExtendedEditionBuyOnlineForaGoodTimeAnyTime is ridiculous. It's just a few places to edit the font name and running makepsres again. And while you're there, you can remove the copyright all rights reserved statement. Piss on Imaginary Property In fact, I've been replacing (c) Adobe with (d) designed by Carol Twombly

And because the interweb provideth:

http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2010/03/ ... -designer/

Enjoy

jimmer wrote: And because the interweb provideth:

http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2010/03/ ... -designer/

Enjoy

Grazie, Senor Jimmer Sir, Esq Because Great Mindes Thinke Alikethe, that's one I saw. Here's another that is more Eurocentric (he says, struggling to find a US designer on the site) ... umm ...

https://www.fontshop.com/families/morris-sans

This one is clunkier to use tho. And Ms Twombly is cool. I am developing a theory that all the best typefaces are designed by kooks

Still doesn't solve the "text looks different in small doses" problem tho ... some pages at Door #2 give a big enough layout that you can get a better idea. More or less ... printing a paper page still might be best

I just discovered something else that may be useful to a future Irixxer ... PhotoShop and Illustrator both use the Type1 fonts that live under /usr/lib/DPS. But Framemaker , from the same manufacturer, only uses its own fonts ! If you want FM to have a wider selection of fonts, you get to jump through some flaming hoops. Woof ! Woof !

Not sure what to think about that


While I was in there I changed New Century Schoolbook back to Century Schoolbook and changed the copyright notice to ATF, 1919. Come get me, Adobe, you intellectual property thieves. Where's the SBA when you really need them ?


+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

edit : may as well stick it here, just in case some future historian discovers the search button ... might help some people save a little time.


Fonts in Pre-23 Irix :

Bitmap fonts, pretty much the same as standard X. Even real similar to Loonix.

I did make one little change that may or may not speed things up a tad - we have very slow cpu's so the little stuff makes a difference ? The font path searches 100dpi, 75dpi, misc, Type1, Speedo, and CID. I have nothing useful in half those. So I changed the name of 75dpi to 75dpi-bak (never can tell when you may need it), created a replacement 75dpi folder and put a fonts.dir file in it with just the one line "0". Without that fonts.dir X will not start. Don't ask how I know that. Now it only searches the folders with the fonts I actually use. 5 milliseconds but they add up

One interesting side effect of this change was that some system fonts changed. Apparently all the bitmap fonts don't exist in both 75 and 100 dpi versions. So while you may think you are using 100 dpi bitmaps, maybe you aren't. 200 dpi monitor, 75 dpi fonts. Mmm, good


Outline fonts, ha ! slightly different. In Irix, the real font files go under /usr/lib/DPS/outline/base and the metrics go in /usr/lib/DPS/AFM. DPS = Display Postscript.

To add new scalable fonts, they need to be Type1 and pfa format. The font files go as above but the names have to be the real font name, no extension. Real font name can be found by < grep /FontName font file's visible name >. The inner name and the outer name have to match. The metrics files go under /usr/lib/DPS/AFM, straight text files, no extension, name matches the file in /usr/lib/DPS/outline/base. Then a < makepsres > operation will have the fonts usable by any Display PostScript application. e.g., Illustrator and Photoshop. Framemaker should but it apparently only uses its own fonts. There is a process to add those to Maker but that's at the discretion of the user.

At this moment, your DPS applications can use the scalable fonts but nothing else can. If that's all you want, stop here.

To add the Type1's to X so that everything else can use them, Irix shadows the real files to /usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 and adds a .pfa extension. There is a script to do this automatically (forget the name but it's something like < xtype1 > or you can do it manually. Then the usual < mkfontdir > and < xset fp rehash > apply. But Ha ! there's a gotcha. Irix has a file "ps2xlfd " under /usr/lib/X11/fonts. This maps the PostScript names to XLFD names. Without this, you can see the font names in xfontsel but if you try to actually use them, kaboom ! Outta X you go. How rude ! I believe there's a script to create this file as well but for just a few fonts, I add them manually. Or in the case of Rock, Cave, and Amie removal, I delete them manually. Who in the heck put those abortions into a professional-grade workstation ? Was this an early sign of how SGI was losing it ?

Another small thing I discovered by experimentation (fools rush in ...) the xlfd does not have to be exactly what the font thinks it is. It actually just maps what the user sees to a specific font file. In general, Adobe steals everyone else's imaginary property and claims it for themselves. In the xlfd you can change the foundry (for example) to whatever you want. X doesn't seem to care. For instance, I redid all my "New" Century Schoolbook to Century Schoolbook and the foundry to American Type Founders, who actually created the typeface. You can safely remove all the extraneous "MT" and "LT" and other bullshit from the fontnames (in xlfd) as well.

To go one step deeper ... in the Type1 files, you can easily change the font names to something more reasonable. I don't need or want "Pro", "Standard" or "Capt'n Billy's Whizz-bang" in all my font names. It's stupid and makes all the drop-down lists as wide as the Mississippi. Emma come-a once, then I come-a ... And the type "foundries" are no longer foundries, they are just shysters sucking at mommy's titty, collecting from their trust funds while waving a "we're Job Creators !" flag. To hell with them ... so let's Nedit back into the /usr/lib/DPS/outline/base font files and replace the (c) 2003 Adobe Systems with (c) 1919 Mathew Benton, American Type Founders. Or even better, (c) 1989 Adobe Systems can be replaced with (c) 1560 Claude Garamont. Let's give the credit to the people who did the work

I know, wasted an hour on this. But it gives me some pleasure. I dislike hypocrites.

Don't forget to also change the afm's and redo all the supporting files, xset fp rehash, all that.

Nice fonts well-organized - it's like having a six-pack under the shaker.

If I got some of this wrong, corrections are welcome. Okay, not exactly welcome but necessary anyhow. Bad information is the bane of our world, so much total bullshit out there

Also just discovered Herman Zapf died last month. Sad Let's have a moment of silence for our dingbats ...

OKay, a little appendix, answer a few unasked-questions :

First, I never could find a Unix Loonix uninstalled-font viewer. Easiest way seems to be drag the font into Windows, print up a paragraph to file via a PostScript printer, turn it into a pdf and then look at it. Not lovely but it works. Viewing in Windows tells you nothing, on-screen display is only vaguely similar to what the typeface will really look like.

Second thing to know is, the process for installing scalable fonts in Irix is pretty reliable. If you get a font that refuses to work, suspect the font first. I wasted several hours at least because I was sure I was doing something wrong. The fact that the font works in DPS does not mean it will work in X.

A few things that are not in techpubs that I learned the hard way :

You don't have to put all your type1 fonts under /usr/lib/DPS/outline/base. You can split them into other directories. This command :

can be run as

(all on one line)

and it will add the other directory full of font files to the DPSFonts.upr fontlist file. I just stuck all the afm's into the one directory. Couldn't think of any reason to split them up.

So if you want to organize into, for example, the base fonts which are loaded in PostScript printers, and all your cutesy-wutesy fonts somewhere else, the utilities will still work. The DPSFonts.upr file tells DPS where to look.

Adding to X :

No need for a makefontscale utility. This one was a pain in the ass. I searched and searched fruitlessly for something it turned out you don't need. There are a few makefontscales hanging around on the web but they don't work in Irix. But mirabile dictu, Irix comes with (don't know what subsystem, could be DPS or Impressario or something else) < type1xfonts > which not only shadows the DPS fonts into X, but it also creates the fonts.scale file. Whoo-oo ! Nice.

Sort of. If you have, say, two or three directories of fonts under /usr/lib/DPS/outline, < type1xfonts > will shadow the font files to the /usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 directory and simultaneously create the fonts.scale file. Per directory. Do < type1xfonts -t postscript-fontfile-directory -x x-fontfile-directory -e (if you want) .pfa (it will do that automatically tho so no need).

That shadows all the DPS fontfiles in that directory to X, adds the pfa extension, and writes a nice fonts.scale file. Unfortunately, if you already have a fonts.scale file in the X/fonts/Type1 directory, it just overwrites rather than appending.

To add more directories of fonts, first hide the existing fonts.scale, let < type1xfonts > create a new one, then just append the new one to the old one (and change the number at the top to match the number of listed fonts.)

Then run the normal X < mkfontdir > as root within that directory, < xset fp rehash > and bob's yer uncle.

Don't forget the ps2xld_map file or your type1's still won't work in X. That's easy tho, just snag the long font name from fonts.dir and add it to ps2xlfd_map.

You can change copyright notices and the foundry and font designers to give the credit where it is due.* But you have to do it manually, there's no automated Irix tool to do that. Yet

Why split up the Type1 fonts into multiple directories ? I was thinking that in Illustrator, maybe I wanted a bunch of goofy decorative fonts, a wider variety of choices, more sizes and artistic features. But in X, I don't want to have to scrounge through a list of 175 fonts just to find a clean serif for a note to Mom. And Framemaker doesn't seem to use the system fonts, so it would be easy to choose a subset of the available fonts to serve just to the Frame. Multiple directories makes it easy to choose which fonts are available to what programs.

Working okay now. 6.5.21 - 6.5.22 is good. Real good.


* Doing this got me thinking .... reading the Adobe brochures, Robert Slimbach spent hours and hours and dollars and dollars going over Claude Garamont's original texts to make as accurate a typeface as possible. Then he spent many more hours making it pretty and standard. Very nice !

So .... if I go to the library and take out Huckleberry Finn , can I make the pages pretty, turn it into a set of 'computer instructions" (like a text file ?) then copyright it as my own ? I can barely wait to start suing those bastards at Doubleday for infringing on my ! intellectual property !!!


A little additional entertainment :

Fonts F.A.Q. wrote: The (more or less) original point system (Didot) did have exactly 72 points to the inch. The catch is that it was the French imperial inch, somewhat longer than the English inch, and it went away in the French Revolution.

And we're (sort of) still using it There's more to that story but this was the funniest part.