Registered: Nov 1999
Location: Pittsburgh, PA, USA Interests: Women, Drums, Visors, Computers, Home Theater and any cool gadgets.
Posts: 138

Fine Type fonts

Does anyone like the look of the Fine Type fonts on their Prism?

Seems to make the display rather blurry to me. I thought its main purpose was to allow more characters per line, it doesn't seem to do that for me. I tried converting a few true type fonts but none really seem to work well.

Anyone else feel this way or am I missing something?

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Registered: May 2000
Location: St. Paul, MN
Posts: 1429

The charactors on the line will stay the same, (or get less or more) the point of FineType, is to make it easier to read, which IMHO it is. Make sure you have FineType enabled under Display Options, and I like it heavy, not light, its less blurry. On my Prism, the fonts at 12 pt are sharp - not blurry, when you get to 8 pt (I've played around A LOT with the converter) the font is really small, but it's fuzzy - stlil nicer to read.

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-miradu

Registered: Nov 1999
Location: Pittsburgh, PA, USA Interests: Women, Drums, Visors, Computers, Home Theater and any cool gadgets.
Posts: 138

I understand that Fine Type is to clear up the fonts. They still look bad. The display is really not as clear as regular text is.

I am sue it is on and set to heavy etc... I tried various fonts and various settings and various sizes. They all look bad. In no way is this making the display better. Unless it is my Prism. Everything else looks good

quote:

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Originally posted by miradu2000
The charactors on the line will stay the same, (or get less or more) the point of FineType, is to make it easier to read, which IMHO it is. Make sure you have FineType enabled under Display Options, and I like it heavy, not light, its less blurry. On my Prism, the fonts at 12 pt are sharp - not blurry, when you get to 8 pt (I've played around A LOT with the converter) the font is really small, but it's fuzzy - stlil nicer to read.

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Registered: Sep 1999
Location: at work...
Posts: 736

quote:

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Originally posted by Babylon5
I understand that Fine Type is to clear up the fonts. They still look bad. The display is really not as clear as regular text is.

I am sue it is on and set to heavy etc...

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Registered: Aug 2000
Location: South Carolina
Posts: 1062

Why is this font system any better than using Font 123 and changing them in WordSmith thru that program?

Registered: Feb 2000
Location: London, UK
Posts: 92

Mac users and Fine Type

Well, I've done a little fiddling, since I wanted to see what FineType looks like and I use a Mac.

First, I fired up RealPC (well, you have to slum it from time to time..)

I downloaded the Windows version of WordSmith, which installs, but fails when you try to convert fonts if you don't have the Palm desktop stuff installed - I guess it can't work out where to save them.

With the Windows desktop installed, the FineType converter runs quite happily; if you click on the Advanced button, you can choose where to save the PDB files that are created, so I popped them back on the Mac.

Since RealPC didn't have Helvetica, which is what I'm using for the book I'm writing at the moment, I had to download a demo version of TransType (works for 3 days) from www.font.to which converted a couple of my Mac-only fonts to Windows TrueType.

I ran these through the FineType convertor, saved them back on the Mac partition and then dragged them into the Palm Installer (they appeared as PC files, so double clicking would probably have launched RealPC again).

They installed just fine, and work a treat on my Deluxe.

However, 12 point is a little on the large size, so I'll probably end up turning FineType off. I know 12 is a little large, but it's what I use for bashing out books, so the printouts are easy to read and correct.

I have a few niggles about WS 2, though. It would be good to have support for the stylesheets that I use in the documents; as it is, I have to manually apply styles to things like headings when I bring the document back into Word 98 on the Mac.

And the page footers disappear too, so I have to pop those back in.

Those, though, are really just a minor thing. WordSmith is possibly one of the most useful things I have on my Palm. I seem to have spent a lot of time lately taking friends to hospital and waiting around while they're seen; with WS and the Stowaway I can still get on with writing while I'm sitting in a waiting room, and it's pretty productive - around 1500 words in 75 minutes last Friday.

The greatest impediment to productivity is the number of people who come and ask what I'm doing, and what gadgets I'm using!

Nigel.

PS. I know not all Mac users will have access to something like RealPC to help convert fonts; what do you suppose the copyright problems would be if someone were to host .PDB versions of the standard Mac fonts on a web page somewhere?

Registered: Oct 2000
Location:
Posts: 380

Re: Mac users and Fine Type

quote:

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Originally posted by nwhitfield
PS. I know not all Mac users will have access to something like RealPC to help convert fonts; what do you suppose the copyright problems would be if someone were to host .PDB versions of the standard Mac fonts on a web page somewhere?

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In theory, the only part of the font that would be protected is the name (if it is trademarked). The font bitmaps themselves cannot be copyrighted. What can and is copyrighted, is the program that is used to produce the outline. The wierd thing about PostScript type 3 and TrueType fonts, is that the font file is actually a piece of executable code that produces the cleaned up bitmap in whatever size is needed. The bitmap of the font that is produced is considered data and not a document. Documents can be copyrighted, data cannot.

However, keep in mind that when dealing with lawyers from large corporations such as MS or Adobe, that what is correct and legal does not necessarily count for much. Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov.