GS Specific Fonts     		by John Wana
----------------			-------------

Ever since the Apple IIgs was introduced, we have all suffered from the tyranny
of Macintosh fonts.  These strange looking fonts were long and thin on the
screen were unusable for real work unless we wanted to print things using
vertical condense.  This pretty much threw out the idea of true WYSIWYG for all
the work that we did for word processing, desktop publishing, and many others. 
Apple had taken the lazy way out preferring to just convert mac fonts to the
Apple IIgs which turned out looking ghastly.

When I first got my Apple IIgs, the world of fonts was wonderful, or so I
thought.  I figured that i'd actually see the exact work I did on the computer
screen to scale.  How disillusioned I was!  I began to wonder why there were no
Apple IIgs fonts or why nobody made any.  With the recent introduction of many
Apple IIgs font editors, I knew that this was now possible, however it never
came about until now.

The basic idea behind making GS specific fonts is to rescale the old Macintosh
fonts and then do minor touchups.  After some testing and printing, I discovered
that the ideal scale was to keep the font the same horizontal width but to
decrease the vertical length in half.  Here is a sample of the conversion which
I did to a Geneva 12 font.

In the included font samples, you will see that if you print out geneva-12 in
vertical condense and then print out geneva-6 in normal size, they turn out to
be the same (with minor differences because i'm not very good at touching up
fonts).  I have included GS Geneva-6, GS Geneva-12, and GS Chicago 6.

To make the fonts is very simple.  The only things that you will need is a font
editor that can scale both vertically and horizontally (I used GS Font Editor by
Beagle Brothers) and a font that is exactly double the size of the font you want
to make.  Now, scale the font so that vertically, it is half of the original,
and horizontally the same size.  After that, you can touch up the font so that
it looks better because the font looses some details after scaling it down. 
Also what might work better is if you double the width of the font and keep the
vertical size the same.

After you finish making the font, edit the attributes of the font.  Change the
name to something like GS Geneva or GS Chicago so that you don't get your fonts
mixed up with the macintosh fonts.  Also you will have to change the id's of the
fonts to avoid any font ID conflicts.  Now you can save the font into the font
folder on the system disk (/system.disk/system/fonts/).

When you want to use the fonts, just choose a new font as you normally would. 
The only problem that may occur is that many programs print a list of the sizes
of the fonts for you to choose from and most don't go down to 6 point because
they are designed for macintosh font.  To solve this problem, many programs also
have an option to go to the Choose Font dialog.  In this mode, you can choose
any size font that you want to use.

Now you can work with true WYSIWYG on the Apple IIgs.  The only program that I
currently know of that will have problems with these fonts is Graphicwriter III.
 Apparently this program is always on vertical condense and you cannot alter it,
however I believe that it has a view mode that lets you see the macintosh fonts
on a Apple IIgs scale.

Any comments or suggestions or whatever is appreciated!

You can contact me over the networks here:

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