Victor said:
> Hey there all, I was wondering if someone could help me identify a
> package. On the eMate CD-ROM, in the PRE-INST/SYSUPDTS/ folder
> (http://www.unna.org/unna/apple/eMateCDROM/PRE-INST/SYSUPDTS/) there
> is a
> package called FONTWIDT.PKG. I have no idea what this package
> does :) I
> suspect that it fixes a printing bug in the eMate described at the
> bottom
> of this page:
>
> http://www.unna.org/unna/apple/Newton_Development/tech_info/QAs/html/spactext.
> htm
>
> If anyone can shed some light on this (or has the documentation for the
> CDROM to look through) I'd greatly appreciate it.
Victor, I can't say what the heck FONTWIDT.PKG does, but I *can* shed
some light onto Apple's claims about font problems. I dealt with this
annoying issue quite a bit when generating my PostScript-printing fonts,
and discussed it some at
http://scruffy.cs.umd.edu:8080/seanl/Newton/Fonts/
In Apple's font frames, you can specify bitmaps to print on the screen
and ALSO specify a PostScript font name to use when printing. But when
you go to print, the PostScript fonts are slightly bigger or smaller so
the lines get messed up.
Apple claimed this was because of a mismatch in the font metrics due to
not-quite-perfect font matching (Simple -> Helvetica for example). But
even if your bitmap metrics are *identical* to the PostScript font
metrics (as is the case for the fonts on my page), you *still* have
width mismatches. The reason for this is because of two serious Newton
bugs which Apple doesn't mention on the webpage. First, the Newton
doesn't understand point sizes right: they're too small by about 10%
(Apple says 6% but they're wrong). You have to reduce font point sizes
by about 10% to print correctly. It's a bug, but it can be dealt with.
Second and much more serious, the Newton's Quickdraw engine measures
everything with integers, and PostScript measures everything with
floats, and NewtWorks blew it converting it from one to another. They
got a rounding error somewhere. As a result, if you change from bold to
italics or plain or something in the middle of a line, you are likely to
have overlap in text or unsightly gaps. It basically makes the
NewtWorks wordprocessor worthless printing to PostScript. :-( This
isn't a problem with the NotePad, it works fine.
These problems exist on MP2100s and MP2000s, so it's not an emate
thing. If FONTWIDT.PKG fixes something, I'd imagine it fixes only the
bug mentioned in the last paragraph on that web page.
Sean
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