Date : Sat, 18 Sep 1982 1857-:00PDT
From : Jeffrey@Office-2
Subject: MX80 Typesetting
One of the responses to my printer query earlier this month
described a package called Fancy Font from SoftCraft
(8726 S. Sepulveda Blvd, Suite 1641, Los Angeles, CA 90045,
213-641-3822).
Fancy Font is billed as a "Personal Typesetter" which prints
on an Epson printer which is equipped with the Epson
GrafTraks option.
After seeing some very impressive page copies, I decided to
plunk down my $180 for the Fancy Font formatter/print program,
the font creation and edit programs, and the various font
and character tables which come with the package.
It arrived today and so did the Graftak ROMs. I had my
usual amount of trouble installing the ROMs (I wasn't
real good as a 1401 operator either). Eventually, the ROMs
were installed and the printer worked as it had before mangling.
Next I brought up the Fancy Font print program and it printed
out one of my recent letters in Olde18 font (Old English style -
18 points high). Its really nice. The print quality on my
MX80 is about the same as that of Knuth's Tex and Metafont
book - which means that it looks very good but under close
inspection (eyeballing) is a little raggety. In any case, for
a $525 printer, its fantastic.
You wont be printing books however, since the print speed is
quite slow (advertised at about 6 lines per minute).
Nonetheless, Fancy Font is terrific in my opinion. The
package includes about 30 font sets (5 or 6 basic styles
in a number of different sizes and faces) as well as a large
table of characters from which new fonts may be built .
The most impressive feature (once you get over the idea that
your little MX80 can typeset) is Fancy Font's ability to
accept new characters.
You can hand fancy font a text file which contains an image
made "drawn" from asterisks. Each asterisk represents
a point on a grid which is up to 216 x 120 . Using
Efont (the font editor), you associate the image with
an ASCII code (0-127). Then to invoke that image at
print time, simply include the character corresponding to
the code in the text file which you print.
The following image generates a (vertically compressed
"character" which is aobut 5/8 of an inch high. The
maximum size character is about one inch square.
******
* *
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**** * ****
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******* ******* ******
******* *******
******* **** *******
******* *** *** ********
******* ***** ***** *********
******** *** *** *********
********* **** **********
********** ************
*********** **************
********** ****************
********** *******************
********** ***********************
* ***************
*
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******************************************************
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* ********************
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*** ***
******** ********
Here is the image for the letter "A" from a 12 point
roman bold faced font:
*
*
*
***
***
***
***
***
* **
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* **
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*******
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***** ******
When printed, the "A" looks much more graceful due to
compression in the vertical plane.
I think that Fancy Font is a little bit revolutionary
and deserves attention.
Jeffrey Stone
Menlo Park, CA