GS WorldView
November MIM



Pointless Experimentation

Pointless is available from Shareware Solutions II
http://www.crl.com/~joko/


     With all of the recent talk about fonts, it seemed like a good time to
play around with Alan Bird's Pointless and see what's going on with TrueType
stuff, especially fontpacks.

     It turns out that with the Pointless CDEV installed, you do get access to
TT fonts in Shadowrite, Coolwriter, ... Platinum Paint, etc..

     The way this works is that you go to the Pointless control panel and "Add"
fonts from a TT fontpack (like the 6MB monster pack on Ground). Pointless 
then creates a TT fonts list file in your SYSTEM/FONTS/ folder. This
TT fonts list has the names of the added fonts, the name(s) of the fontpack(s)
which hold the font(s), and the pathname(s) for the fontpack file location(s).

     Now, when you select a font from an application (like Platinum Paint) the
choices you see include the fonts in the regular fonts list (for the fonts
located in SYSTEM/FONTS) plus the fonts in the TT fonts list.

     So, having the Pointless CDEV does supply general access to a bunch more
fonts. 

     And, if you decide you'd rather not have Pointless installed all of the
time but want to have regular access to some fonts it accesses, Pointless can 
convert selected fonts to bit-mapped form. You specify the point size-- usually
.18 or .24) in the Save name. The resulting fonts can go into SYSTEM/FONTS/
and be accessed without Pointless. 

     Something which is not much discussed is that, more often than not,
TrueType fonts are not especially suitable for super-res display at normally
useful font sizes. For example, In the entire 6MB fontpack mentioned earlier,
maybe 10 fonts are worthwhile having for regular use with Platinum Paint.

     Again, we are talking about putting dots on the IIgs screen. For printouts from
a good quality printer, you want lots of detail in your fonts.

     As might be expected, using the TT fonts in Teach documents is not very practical. 
Many users will not have access to the fonts and, so, will not be able to view a
Teach document which uses any of them.

     Mainly, the TT fonts are going to be very useful for printouts.



Rubywand