Path: news.uh.edu!barrett From: markus@TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld.DE (Markus Illenseer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Fresh Fonts CD-ROM, Volume 1 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications Date: 17 Nov 1994 03:51:09 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 466 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <3aejvd$q12@masala.cc.uh.edu> Reply-To: markus@TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld.DE (Markus Illenseer) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: CD-ROM, fonts, shareware Originator: barrett@karazm.math.uh.edu PRODUCT NAME Fresh Fonts CD-ROM, Volume 1 BRIEF DESCRIPTION This is a font CD for Amiga computers and other computer platforms. It contains fonts in various formats. All material is made available in (original) archived form and unarchived form. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Danny Amor Address: Ludwigstr. 124 70197 Stuttgart Germany Telephone: +49 (0)711 63 65 633 E-mail: amor@student.uni-tuebingen.de DISTRIBUTION Main places to buy the CD-ROM currently are: USA: Amiga Library Services 610 North Alma School Road , Suite 18 Chandler, AZ 85244-3687 USA Telephone: (602) 917-0917 Fax: (602) 917-0917 Germany: Stefan Ossowski Schatztruhe Gesellschaft für Software mbH Veronikastraße 33 45131 Essen Germany Telephone: +49 201 78 87 78 Fax: +49 201 79 84 47 LIST PRICE The CD is free for everyone who buys a CD from either Amiga Library Services (Fred Fish) or Stefan Ossowski Schatztruhe under certain conditions: ask each distributor for details. For everyone else, a fee to cover costs and shipping of about DM 10.- (approximately $5.00 (US)) is charged. This is my latest information; please ask for more details if necessary. The CD is a shareware compilation and the author of the CD is asking a shareware fee of DM 15.- ($10.00 (US)) if you like the CD. If you don't like the CD or aren't using it, you are requested to give the CD to someone else who might find it more useful. I got the CD for free. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE An Amiga computer. A CD-ROM drive such as the A570, A1270, CDTV, CD32 or any supported third party CD-ROM drive. 512KB of RAM is required. 2MB RAM is recommended, but 5-8MB RAM is best. A hard disk is recommended if you intend to install some of these fonts or programs for permanent use. SOFTWARE AmigaDOS 1.3 or higher. Works fine with AmigaDOS 2.x and 3.x (highly recommended). Requires a suitable CD-ROM filesystem such as AsimCDFS, AmiCDFS, AmiCD-ROM, Babel CDFS, or Xetec CDFS. COPY PROTECTION None. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 3000, 2 MB Chip RAM, 12 MB Fast RAM Several hard drives. Apple CD300 (Sony CDU-8003A) CD-ROM drive. AmigaDOS 3.1 (Kickstart 40.68, Workbench 40.35) For further tests, I used a Macintosh Quadra 650 with internal CD300 CD-ROM drive and standard Finder 7.x setup. REVIEW In a general overview, I would like to tell you about the makings and the wherefrom of this CD-ROM. I then will review the installation, compilation and the overall use of the CD. GENERAL Another CD-ROM review. Not bribed this time - I'm reviewing the CD for fun and to support the idea of this shareware CD. As usual, I have some background of the process behind the making of this CD, although this time I must admit that it is not that profound as it might be. You might remember that Fred Fish wanted to test the idea of a shareware CD-ROM. After dozen of (fruitless?) discussions on Usenet and private mail, he made the decision to start the test at this year's "Computer `94" show (formerly World of Commodore or AmiExpo) in Cologne. With 50,000 people attending, this show is one of the biggest for the Amiga Computer, although the Amiga no longer is the main reason and platform for this show. Fred found - not easy these days - a partner who has megabytes of unseen material he wanted to share with other peoples. Using this as a base, he released the so called Fresh Fonts CD-ROM at the mentioned show. Attending the show at the stand of the 'Schatztruhe' (English: treasure chest) of Stefan Ossowski, he gave everyone who bought a CD-ROM on this stand and was interested into the Fresh Font CD a free CD. He did not accept the shareware fee in cash! So the test still is open up to the users: is the idea of a shareware CD successful? Will they send Danny the fee? I really hope so. Until the release of the CD, or short time before, I hadn't heard the name of 'Daniel Amor'. He is responsible of the compilation of the CD and is engaged as an 'unprofessional' but intermediate user and creator of fonts. He is not a professional typographer or designer. But as fonts are his favorite playground, he is very competent and actually knows quite a lot of the background of creating and using fonts on several computer platforms. Of course he owns and uses an Amiga. To create one of his several dozen of Fonts, he uses the commercial product 'TypeSmith' for the Amiga. To gather the other material on the CD, he sneaked into Usenet (comp.fonts) and the Internet. Altogether he makes available a nice assemblage of programs and of course Fonts. INSTALLATION The CD was mastered in the ISO 9660 Mode 2 format (hence no crippled filenames), I couldn't locate any directory level deeper than 4 or 5; hence, the CD is ISO compliant and will work with almost every ISO filesystem. The disc has been proved to be readable on Amiga, Mac, and Unix. Installation is quite easy as only Assigns have to be performed to use the supplied fonts. These Assigns are multiple Assigns ('Assign Add Path1: Path2: ...') and are only available on WB 2.x and above. There is no need to copy the fonts on hard drive unless you really need them there instead of on the CD-ROM. The above installation applies only to Amiga platforms. We will see later that the use of the fonts on other platforms is more difficult. DOCUMENTATION The text on the cover on the CD is in English only and describes the contents and the status of the CD. A hint to read the README file on the CD itself is given. The README.1ST file on the CD is written in English, German and French, and covers the status, copyright and contents of the CD (legal mumbling). Also available on the CD is an AmigaGuide hypertext file which again covers the status and so forth, but also is a very nice document about the distributed material. Same content is made available as HTML hypertext to be read with the supplied Mosaic hypertext viewer (Mosaic requires the application packet MUI, which is not on the CD!). Both documents are very well edited and do cover the entire content of the CD in either text and (!) pictures. Supplied programs are documented as well as the fonts themselves. All text is available in English, German and French. Very nice multilingual compilation! All fonts are described in text - where they come from, the author, the status (PD, FD, etc.), the features, and pictures - sample of the fonts as inline or external image of the fonts. FRESH FONTS Vol 1 Now finally I come to tell you about the content of the CD. As you might already gave guessed, the CD contains fonts, fonts, and fonts. And fonts. And programs to create or deal with fonts. I thought I had a nice assemblage of fonts on my hard drive - through the years of using my Amiga, I gathered about 20MB of fonts. I was wrong: there are lot more fonts. :-) Made available on this CD are about 200 fonts (font families) which are classified into 6 categories . There are the usual Script, Serif, Sans-Serif fonts, but also Deco (decorative) and Picture fonts. Last but not least, there is a class which is of special interest of Danny Amor: non-Latin fonts for our Hebrew, Russian, Greek, Arabic and even Chinese friends. Most of these fonts are made available in different file formats: - Adobe (can be used on any system, also used for Postscript) - Truetype (native fonts of PC-Windows) - Intellifonts (Agfa Intellifonts, native Amiga format, also common on Mac) - Amiga Bitmap (Amiga computers only) - DMF (Amiga DTP program Pagestream 3.0 format) This makes the CD apparently very useful in multiplatform environments found in design and video studios, as well as private use at home. This covers the largest part of the CD, with about 400MB. The rest is covered by programs for Amiga, Mac, Acorn and PC. Unfortunately the compilation is not fully achieved: the first volume of this CD only contains programs for the Amiga and PC. Not owning a PC, I can review only the supplied Amiga programs. Some very useful tools are found on the CD; among them two excitingly useful packages for me. PasTeX version 1.4 BETA (3) - newer version than found on Fresh-Fish Vol 1 and Meeting Pearls Vol 1 - is installed on the CD. As one might expect this version of the archive contains more fonts and resolutions ever made available for an Amiga TeX distribution. Another tool - to be voted tool of the month - is 'cachefont'. This tool reads the entire fonts list you have on your system and writes them into a list. Now a daemon has to be started to 'patch' the requests of fonts by other programs such as 'Sys:Prefs/Fonts'. Amazingly fast! Only the list is read and displayed, and not the entire system, so you stop wasting time to wait for the lists - it's done once only. It takes about 5 Minutes to generate the list of the fonts of the CD - with cachefont this task is to be done once and not every time you open a font requester. More tools to be used directly from CD are various converters, a font editor, and two word processors. One of them is 'rashumon', which is capable of displaying and editing text and graphics in various fonts, even editing text from right to left. A wonderful supplement is 'hebrewbible' - it contains the text of the hebrew bible ('Old Testament') (I believe it is a full archive and covers the whole bible, but then again I am not qualified to tell this; many apologies to our Jewish friends among the readers!). Also this archive contains programs for the Amiga to read and display the texts with the hebrew fonts supplied on the CD. USAGE OF THE CD The overall use of the CD is easy. Tools are made available in archived from for BBS usage and in unextracted form to be started directly off the CD. This also applies to PasTeX. Very useful is the script 'assignallfonts', which adds the entire font archive to the Amiga font path. There are several other 'assignfonts' in lower directories, so you can choose which part of the fonts you want to use on your system. So once you clicked on the 'assignfonts' icon, you can use the fonts. Now let us have a closer look at the fonts. Usage on Macintosh Computers is ... not given, I will discuss this matter in the 'dislikes' section. Usage on PC could not be tested. FONTS, FONTS, FONTS.... I am no typographer and have no idea what a good font must have to be good and useful. So browsing though the fonts only showed to me that there are a *lot* of fonts. :-) Using several word processors and DTP programs such as a borrowed PageStream yielded the conclusion that the fonts are usable and offer a nice playground to destroy any hopes of proper use of typographic rules for layouts. :-) One major drawback is that many of the fonts do not have Umlauts or other special chars. This is very pitiful, and seeking out for reasons I found out that most of the fonts which ignored the existence of Umlauts were made by our friends of non-metric countries such as the USA.... *BANG* :-) If you ever intend to create fonts of your own, please do create Umlauts, too. The Amiga is using ISO-8859-Latin-1 as a base for chars and fonts and is not fixed to 7Bit Ascii chars - same even does apply to Windows and X11! Another topic is the overall used class of proportional fonts. These fonts are not useful in word processors such as 'Cygnus Ed', because of their dynamic allocation of length. Most of the fonts are proportional and hence are designed appropriately. Thus the use of these fonts is directed to DTP, DTD and other usage of this kind. This is of course not a drawback. To continue the test, I went to a friend who is graduated typographer and owns a Macintosh computer. After struggling hard around with his basic installation (he does have many DTP programs and such, but no converters for fonts or a program with capability of reading GIF pictures...) we had to conclude that the CD is useless for basic Macintosh environments. Neither the Suitcase utility nor Font-DA-Mover (both standard utilities on the Mac to deal with fonts) was able to read any of the fonts directly off the CD. It looks like that the fonts have to be converted with special utilities to a Mac-readable form (resource files for HDFS of Macintosh are missing). Unfortunately these tools are not supplied on the CD itself. I couldn't yet fully test the Postscript fonts on the CD. A small test with 'PostView' on the Amiga showed that the fonts did not load because of wrong filenames - but it could be my fault. Missing for all platforms other than Amiga are programs to view the document: Mosaic is only made available for Amiga. Using 'ncsamosaic' on the Mac showed that the supplied hypertext is readable. LIKES I like the overall compilation. It shows that unseen and unknown material can be made attractive and useful for everybody. A very nice idea was to use Mosaic to document the enormous variety of the fonts; using inline images at appropriate places makes the use of the fonts very easy. Also good idea was to make the programs and the fonts (!) supplied on the CD be available for BBS in archived form. A wonderful idea was to supply 'cachefont' - a grateful thank you to Adam Daws, the programmer of this tool. The CD is sending another signal to other compilations: multilingual documentation. Really good and standard setting. But then again Danny Amor seems to be a genius in languages anyway. He has knowledge of Russian, Czech, Arabic as well as Hebrew, German, English, French and Italian languages (and appropriate fonts). DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS I have the impression that somehow the author had not that much time to finish the CD. There are no programs made available for Mac and Acorn although the directories are created and the platforms are mentioned on the cover of the CD. No technical background or guidelines are given. I miss at least the comp.fonts-FAQ from Usenet. I might have expected guidelines for Amiga programmers about how to use fonts in their programs. As a sidenote I should say that this is of course not the task of a CD, but this assemblage is the first of its kind on the Amiga and it could have set more standards. The hypertext is missing an overview of *all* the fonts on one (large) page to browse them. An easy task. I really do miss more hints about how to use the CD on other platforms. The sentence 'ignore the .info files on the CD' is easily said but useless information. It is really necessary to give a guide to the user of this CD on other platforms. Also I miss Mosaic binaries for the Mac, PC and Acorn. Without this application you won't be able to display the documentation on these platforms. The README file was edited on the Amiga - and hence only contains carriage returns rather than carriage returns and linefeeds at the end of a line. This makes the text hard to read on other platforms. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS Using Fonts is essential in DTP and DTD environments. There are dozen of professional CD-ROMs available with many fonts on them. Most of them are really expensive and contain professionally edited and created fonts. Other are available for free and supply a tool to choose desired fonts for which then you have to pay for. These CDs are only valuable for specific platforms such as Macintosh computers. I have used an original Agfa Compugraphic font CD on the Amiga some time ago. Compared with the fonts on the Fresh Font CD, these fonts are of course way more professional. But the goal of the Fresh Fonts CD is not being professional but useful for low budget users. To my knowledge there is no other CD-ROM available which is directed for use on Amiga, so comparison with similar products is a difficult task. BUGS No bugs found - if you can find bugs in fonts at all. VENDOR SUPPORT Danny Amor is reachable via email and answers questions quite promptly. Same does apply to Fred Fish. WARRANTY Standard warranty applies to this CD. CONCLUSIONS The CD is very useful on the Amiga - if you are in need of fonts! A nice product which fills the gap left open until then in the corner of DTP and DTD. A must for every Amiga user - video, graphics or word-processor user and even programmer. I will rate the product with 4 out of 5 stars. The last star can be achieved when the promised multiplatform usefulness of the product is achieved. Rating the product for Amiga-only usage would give a 4.5 out of 5; the last half star can be achieved when my complaints are somehow fixed. COPYRIGHT NOTICE This review represents my honest opinion. Your mileage may vary - tell me about it! If you use this review in any way - re-publishing for example, the author requests at least a copy of the used media. Special thanks to disk magazine 'Amiga Gadget' who did so in the past. Copyright 1994 Markus Illenseer. All rights reserved. You can contact the author at: Markus Illenseer Kurt Schumacherstr. 16 33613 Bielefeld GERMANY markus@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews