MediaEscape Club

Font Utilities

This release of Artstream includes utilities called type1SGI and verifyFonts. These are currently shell utilities, (GUI's to come). The type1SGI utility currently supports the following:

  1. A collection of PC font files (.pfa, .pfb, .afm) that have been manually gathered into a single directory.
  2. A collection of fonts that have been installed by Adobe Type Installer.

It will soon support conversion of Mac format fonts as well.

You must have root privileges set to install fonts. Usage for type1SGI is as follows:

For case (1), use any available means of copying files from a PC, such as a network, floppy disks, etc..

  1. Copy all the available .pfa or .pfb and .afm files into a new, temporary, "staging" folder. For example call it fontfolder.
  2. After all the font files have been gathered, attach (cd) to fontfolder and type type1SGI. After you have verified the installation, the fontfolder can be removed.

For case (2), you must notice the destination for Type Installer. By default, it is "/usr/psres". Refer to this as adobepath.

a) Attach to a scratch directory, for example /tmp. From there, type type1SGI adobepath, where adobepath is the actual path name listed by Type Installer.

That's it. Afterwards, when you launch Artstream it will find your new fonts.

Let us know if you have any difficulties with this utility. We have not found a font that breaks it yet.

Be cautious of many of the freeware fonts, as some of them do not fully conform to the Type1 spec, and will crash Artstream if they are accessed. The utility verifyFonts is included in this distribution to verify the compliance of all fonts in your library. This can be run from any directory. It normally completes with a total count of available fonts. If it fails to complete, the font named on the last displayed line is faulty.

A later release will include a utility for removing fonts that fail to verify, but for now they need to be manually removed.

The latest version of Adobe's Type On Call library, (with Unix versions), is for sale at:

http://www.adobe.com/type/tocreg.html

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