This is a review of a earlier Type-Designer version. Sadly many points mentioned in this review are not accurate and reflect the writer's inexperience with the subject of font-editors. I have included it for your perousal, as it still may be of interest.

26 BITS & BYTES - FEBRUARY 1994

A Windows package for editing postscript fonts

Type Designer is a font editor from a small German company called DTP Software. It has set out to create an easy to use Windows package which allows the casual user to edit existing Postscript Type 1 fonts, or create their own fonts altogether. It comes ready supplied with three Postscript fonts - Brush, Copper, and SommScript. Since Version 2.0 it can also convert the freshly created fonts to TrueType format. However, it can't open a TrueType font directly. I installed it without any problems, and although the install program did beep at me for no readily apparent reason, it seemed to go through all right in the end. What it didn't do, however, was to create an Icon in any ofthe existing groups - it merely presented a dialog box describing how to create it for myself. After I did this, I checked the size of the program. The package is actually quite small in comparison to what I've been installing recently - it comes on only one high-density diskette, and when it is installed on the hard disk, it still only takes up about 950Kb, including the three sample fonts.

Editing fonts

It is fairly easy to edit an existing font, just by opening it from the File menu. Not being too much of a graphhics artist (or indeed at all), I began by completely destroying the look of the "Brush" font. It was Type Designer's abilities under scrutiny here - not mine. After a good play, I took a step back, and looked at my wonderful creation - a new letter "0". This one was certainly unique, and that's what this program is all about - the ability to create an entire font with it, but what with the sheer volume of Public Domain and commercial fonts out there, there's probably not too many fonts left to be created.

No, for me the most useful thing a font design package can do is allow me to create proper clip-art as part of a font. Such things as logos for companies, products and the like can all be included into one font, which could then be renamed after the company, and distributed amongst all its staff. Finally, a foolproof method of ensuring a standard way of speliing and displaying all the company's product logos for everyone who uses Windows.

Once your custom character is created, you hit the "Test" button. This shows the character in a range of sizes starting from about four point, right up to as large as the whole screen. Unfortunately, it was here that I found a small cosmetic bug in the program. If you go down too far (about half-way down the scrollbar), the screen has a nasty tendency to completely blank out and demolish everything on it. Luckily it is a cosmetic thing only as a screen-redraw (by Alt/Tab-ing out into Program manager, maximising and returning back to Type Designer) fixes everything. Quite a nasty bug, especially as it was also in version i.l. I liked this package as an introduction to the wonderful world of font-editing. It allows the full creation and editing of fonts, including all the possible font attributes like Kerning Pairs (easy to do), choosing full font family names, weights, italic angles, hinting facilities, even font directions (for right to left fonts). However, I couldn't help wondering if there wasn't an easier way to do it. The curve handles are too small to see at normal size, let alone actually pick them up and drag them along, and the whole package seems a bit "plasticky". I still liked the package, though, as it was easy to use. The TrueType export function is very useful, but should be expanded on. Now that both Windows and Macintosh System 7 have TrueType as a standard part of the operating system, more and more people will convert their fonts from Postscript - after all it's faster to draw on screen, and costs less in memory overheads (no need for ATM), as well as disk space (only one font file needs to be kept, with no need for the bitmaps).
Jack Machiela

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