meloche
From: Unknown
Registered: 2001-05-09
Posts: 23
|
Hi all,
I am attempting to move over from my trusty old Amiga
to my new Wintel machine, using Pagestream 4.0. As
such I will consider the transition complete when I can
convert my old documents (newsletters, documents, and
record files over many years) from Amiga 3.3 to
Windows 4.0r8a. The biggest problem that has surfaced
is the font situation.
I said I would post my font melodrama in another post,
so here it is. It may help others who are trying to
achieve the same things, and maybe someone out there can
say "here's how it works", or "this is how I did it".
I would even take a "you dunderhead, you've got it all
wrong" type of response if I can achieve my goals.
----------------------------------
SUMMARY:
FONTS ARE STILL A NIGHTMARE! I don't know where to begin in
this problem, because I really don't fully understand the issues
involved. For two weeks now I have been asking for help in this
group but I still have not gotten a single explanation. Here is
where I have gotten with trial and error, guessing, and a lot of
wasted time:
A: Installed Pagestream 4.0 on my PC.
B: Brought over my entire file hierarchy from my Amiga 3000, with
all of my Pagestream documents, clipart, and fonts. Fonts
included DMF format (yes, I still used a few), Compugraphic
and Postscript fonts.
C: Tried to find a font manager in PGS 4.0. Decided that
it was too well hidden or not implemented yet.
D: Posted in the Windows beta group ("newcomer with r7")
with many font questions - no response.
E: Read through several months of past entries in the
beta groups and found an offhand reference to the
fact that only the Amiga version of PGS has internal
font management and that the Mac and Windows versions
just use the OS-supplied fonts. Also saw a comment
from Deron in one item where he recommended using
something called "ATM".
F: Searched around on the net and found "Adobe® Type Manager®
(ATM®) 4.1 software for Microsoft® Windows®". It seemed
to be free (the "lite" version) so I downloaded it and
installed it.
G: Tried to use ATM to install my postscript fonts as system
fonts on my PC. It couldn't find them. It is as if they
were not there. Put another query on the Windows beta group.
Again, nobody had any advice to give.
H: After much more searching around, I found out that ATM needs
.pfm files instead of .afm files. Found an MSDOS utility that
will do that conversion. Now fonts showed up and I could use
them in Windows.
I: Even though the fonts showed up, many fonts that worked fine
in PGS Amiga did not work with Windows. Now I had to go
back and remove some fonts which crashed Windows applications.
Some fonts crashed StarOffice even if they were just referenced
by its file requestor.
J: Someone with TypeSmith 2.5 on an Amiga converted my Compugraphic
and DMF fonts to TrueType for me. When I installed them on my
PC I found they were poisonous and crashed anything that tried to
use them!!!!!
K: My friend used TypeSmith to convert the Compugraphic and DMF
fonts to Postscript type 1, exporting both .pfb and .afm files,
the latter of which I converted to .pfm on the PC.
Some of these fonts work with Windows, some don't. I can't
figure out why.
L: Windows and ATM do not seem to have very good font handling
abilities. Good old Amiga PageStream did a MUCH better job
than this stinky Windows OS. I even downloaded a bunch of
nifty TrueType fonts that also crashed Windows apps just trying
to use them (they work with some and crashed others - go
figure). It's all very haphazard.
My current situation:
I have gotten about 90% of the fonts that I used regularly
with Pagestream on the Amiga to work on Windows. Many of these
fonts render correctly on other Windows apps but do not render
correctly in Pagestream. The characters are rendered too wide and
are not spaced correctly in Pagestream, overlapping by as much as
half of their width. Also, other things do not come out the same
either. For instance, the substitution of Arial for
Helvetica/Triumvirate does not always give the same text flow, it
seems.
My requests:
1: Someone please help me understand what I need to do here. I
REALLY want to not have to manually redo every old document that
uses DMF, Compugraphic and Postscript fonts to make them come
out the same as on the Amiga.
2: It would be VERY helpful if there was a FAQ file for the Windows
version of PageStream, especially one dealing with conversion
issues.
3: There should be a page on the SoftLogik (Grasshopper?) web page
with links to utilities needed by us "converters" (like ATM
and Refont.exe, for instance) and instructions
on how to make this difficult migration.
I realize that we are beta users/testers and cannot expect a
polished environment and finished product. It WOULD be nice,
however, to have some direction in dealing with these font issues.
Someone please help me!
Steve Meloche
|
Seriously, you are charting new ground for Amiga users