Re: Mac fonts -> GS?

[nparker@cie-2.uoregon.edu (Neil Parker)]

In article <3fktm1$3na@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> mcafee@umich.edu (Sean
Michael McAfee) writes:
>I think this question was dealt with in this newsgroup recently, so I'll
>keep it short.  How does one transfer a Mac font to the IIGS?  I tried
>transferring one font directly from a Mac hard disk to a ProDOS floppy,
>but it wound up with an unknown file type, and when I manually changed
>it to "font", I got errors when trying to use it.

For Truetype fonts, moving fonts from the Mac to the IIGS is easy...just
put the Mac font suitcase in the IIGS *:System:Fonts folder, and Pointless
takes care of the rest automatically.

Moving bitmapped fonts is a lot harder.  Mac fonts are stored in Mac
resources, while IIGS fonts are stored in the data fork of a IIGS font
file.  You need to extract the Mac font resource from the font suitcase,
attach a family name and a IIGS font header to the front of the font, and
save the result in the data fork of a IIGS font file.  It can be done by
hand (I've done it a few times), but it's a lot of tedious work...I wish
somebody would write a program to do it automatically.

Actually, somebody did once write such a program, but it was written in Old
Days before the IIGS had resource forks or the HFS FST, and it required
that the Mac fonts already be copied into data forks by some program
running on a Mac.  The documentation file made the process seem almost as
awkward as converting it by hand, so I didn't even bother downloading it.


I started to write a Mac font extracter once, but I never managed to get
TML Pascal II to read a Mac resource fork correctly.

               - Neil Parker
--
Neil Parker                 No cute ASCII art...no cute quote...no cute
nparker@cie-2.uoregon.edu   disclaimer...no deposit, no return...
nparker@cie.uoregon.edu     (This space intentionally left blank:           )