Vogler Software,
£49.95
Jackfont is a monochrome-only utility program designed to edit fonts
used by any program which uses GDOS, or GDOS fonts (at the moment
only a few like Easydraw, Degas Elite and Fleet Street Publisher
allow multiple GDOS fonts). As such, it is a God-send as until now
there has been no good font editor available either on the Atari ST
or the IBM PC.
Jackfont has
three windows that it uses for font editing. The main one is a large
grid display (from 5x3 to 72x80) typical of font editors and the
second large one (the Select Box) contains a full 256 character
display from which the character to edit is selected. There is also
a small 'actual size' window in which nine variations (bold,
underlined etc.) of the character can be displayed. The process of
editing a character is to select the character in the Select Box,
and then use the mouse in the main editing grid to invert pixels.
Rolls, shifts, mirrors and flips can also be done and three fonts
are supplied for experimentation. When the character is to your
satisfaction, you select another to edit — the edited character is
copied back automatically. When the whole font is finished, you can
save it back to disk (choosing another filename if you desire).
Dialogs are available to allow setting of all the various variables
associated with a GEM font, including the point size, the Top,
Ascent, Descent, Bottom and Half values, the file format (Intel or
Motorola), proportional, skewing and more. A very useful dialog is
an automatic re-sizing facility, which stretches the current font to
make a complete range of sizes easily. Also available is a test
screen where the current character is inserted in a sentence and
displayed in several type styles. It is such a pity that this is not
complimented by a complete display of all the font's characters
on-screen at once, as this would be invaluable.
The manual starts with a most educating overview of fonts and is a
credit to Vogler. Only a few bad points (no pun intended) — the
manual describes the 'ID Number' as 'purpose unknown, is used
internally by GEM. It is best to skip this item as GEM doesn't
appear to care what its value is.' As a programmer who has used GDOS
(FaSTcom) I happen to know that this is how a programmer actually
selects a particular font. In a general CAD or DTP program this is
not apparent, but when you want only one font, (e.g. viewdata) you
need to know the fond ID to select it. Different sizes of an ID are
selected with point sizes.
JackFont has some awkward techniques of item selection, and one is
acknowledged in the manual. Because the selector and editor are in
separate windows, you must first click in the window before you can
work in it. In the case of the edit window, if you start clicking
too soon, the first click is mis-understood, and you must click on
another pixel before it will start editing. The manual tries to
excuse this, but it is really bad programming, and should be fixed.
Also the Select Box window should not 'top' when clicked in, but
should just work out where you clicked and set up the appropriate
character for editing. Topping the window continuously soon wears
you out, and there is nothing else to be done in the Select Box
anyway. A key to step to the next / previous character would be
useful here. Also needed is auto-update of the small 'actual size'
screen.
If you have one of the programs mentioned at the beginning of the
review, or are interested in GDOS fonts, then this program has
nothing to touch it on the market at the moment. I shall be using it
often, though I look forward to a new version with the irritations
removed.
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