Fonts
MIchael,
Bitmap fonts are just that: bitmaps. If you scale a bitmap, you usually
lose something in the translation. If you have Dpaint (or something
similar) print some text using one of the regular Amiga fonts, then scale
it. Jaggy city if you do any large amount of upsizing, and they tend to
collapse when shrunk.
Both Compugraphic and Adobe fonts are vector fonts. That means they're
capable of being scaled, skewed, maashed and compressed and still keep the
'edges' nice and smooth. They get 'drawn' rather than just plopped down.
The font description itself is just a series of instructions on drawing
the edges of the type i.e. 'draw a curve from here to there, then a line
from there to elswhere…" then filled with some parts being held
transparent (background masking) More exactly stated, it figures out what
area has to be filled using the vectors, then fills it, though you can
specify stroking (actually drawing the edges) and filling (or not).
Adobe fonts differ from Compugraphic in that Adobe uses some special
Postscript code (and some not so special) to do it, while Compugraphic uses
their own method. To confuse the matter, Compugraphic also makes Adobe
type 1 fonts.
Postscript is not a font, but a page descrition language. That's what's
needed to use Adobe fonts (they wrote and hold the rights to PostScript;
very tightly, too) And they come in different flavors, too: type 1, which
is the best, as they are hinted (routines to fit edges according to the
print-device's capability) and print fast due to their being encoded to
take advantage ofspecial features in PS, type 2 (considered obsolete) and
type 3 ('cheaper' version of type 1, using standard PS code to do the
drawing)
I could go on, but by now you get the idea. Bitmaps are usually quicker
to get on screen, as they don't have to be decoded. Compugraphic fonts get
scaled and turned into bitmap fonts, which then get blasted onto the
screen. Then there's kerning, tracking, etc. ad nauseum.
I hope this is enough to give you the basic idea of what's what as far
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