From: spowell@trentu.ca (STEFAN POWELL)
Subject: Re: supposed IBM OEM font in Type 1 format...
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    
Organization: Trent Computing and Telecommunications Department
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992 22:02:00 GMT

In article <1g7podINNpgo@life.ai.mit.edu>, bkph@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu (Berthold K.P. Horn) writes...
> 
>Recently somebody posted a `Type 1' font for IBM OEM character set.

   That somebody was me.

> 
>====>	It's been a while since I laughed so hard.	<====
> 

   It wasn't _that_ funny.

>Yes, it is a font in Type 1 format, but it was made by Corel Draw WFNBoss by
>tracing around the pixels in a low-resolution bitmap.  It scales alright, but
>all you get is an enlargement of a low resolution blocky bitmap character.

  It seems you know more about this font than I do.  How did you
  know what it was made in?  I think it is suppossed to be blocky
  so that I looks like cheezy Video Terminal Screen characters.
  (Like the name says.)

>Hilarious!  What a delightful misuse of the whole Type 1 concept.

  Again, it wasn't _that_ funny. You have a strange sense of
  humor. I didn't know that a concept like this could be misused.
  We should all  be careful on how we use concepts if they can be
  so easily misused.

>Then, the font is set up in such a way that it will be reencoded to Windows
>ANSI. Hence the character names are completely meaningless.  They are used
>merely as aliases of the numeric character codes.  For example, `alpha'
>appears at 224 in IBM OEM encoding, in Windows ANSI, the character in
>position 224 is `agrave', so in this font the glyph for `alpha' has the name
>`agrave'.  What a wonderful corruption of Adobe's idea of the font encoding
>vector! 

  So.  The mapping is weird. Cope!  If you don't like it, don't
  use it.  I have found this font very useful for a few
  programming assignments where I wanted to recreate some video
  screen displays in a frame in a document.  It worked great!
  I was able to cut and paste from a DOS window.  Try that with
  Windows ANSI encoding!

>Also, there are gaps in the character set, since Windows ANSI does not assign
>a character to every possible value in the 0 - 255 range.  For a start, IBM
>OEM has characters in the range 0 -- 31, but this font does not, of course.
>There are another dozen or so missing characters in the 128 - 160 range, 
>and so on.

  Well, what do you expect from a shareware/freeware font?
  Like I said, if you don't like it then don't use it.

>Aside from that, outlines are traced clockwise, which means they will
>render too heavy on many PostScript interpreters.  

  Well, what do you expect from a shareware/freeware font?
  Like I said, if you don't like it then don't use it.

>Of course, it matters little, since there is no hinting whatever, not even
>the crude `auto-hinting' supplied by present font manipulation software.  
>So the mathematical `equivalence' symbol, for example --- consisting of three
>evenly spaced horizontal strokes --- renders in delightful variable ways
>depending on point size. Sometimes the top stroke is fatter than the middle
>one, sometimes the middle one is fatter than the bottom one.  The spacing
>between them also is unequal, and at some resolutions one or another stroke
>disappears completely.  What a hack!

  Well, what do you expect from a shareware/freeware font?
  Like I said, if you don't like it then don't use it.

  I'm starting to sound like a broken record. Hopefully nothing
  more needs to be said on the matter.
_______________________________________________________________________________
                                             Stefan Powell - SPowell@TrentU.CA
                                                 Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
Newsgroups: comp.fonts