In this text file I will try to explain my motivation for designing my own set of fonts
for ChiWriter, and the strict principles and philosophy I tried to adhere to in the
process of developing these fonts.
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Notwithstanding the fact I felt, and feel, very strongly about most of the items mentioned above, the original incentive to design a new font set was my dissatisfaction with the 9-pin matrix fonts, delivered with the ChiWriter version 2 and 3 package. I liked the philosophy behind the font set, and the font style looked rather nice.
However, the letters appeared very jagged, especially the slanted and curved ones. I reasoned that the second printer pass used, though improving the vertical resolution somewhat, still left a gap of 1/108" to the pass of the next printer pin. This was due to the fact that the distance of 1/72" between the printer pins was subdivided into 3 parts of 1/216". The printer did not support a command for half a step move, only thirds of a step. The only remedy was to introduce a third pass. At the expense of a fifty percent increase in printing time the vertical resolution would be more or less doubled.
From the printer manual I learnt that the horizontal resolution could also be doubled, from 120 dpi to 240 dpi, just by doubling the needle speed. This implied no further loss in printing speed (only a little more noise). Since the entire font set had to be adapted anyway, I could just as well increase the horizontal resolution at the same time.
There was only one problem: in the fast mode horizontally adjacent dots could not be printed. It seemed not a good idea to let the printer decide which dots it could not, and which it could print: we would end up with an average resolution of 120 dpi. The only solution was a very carefully designed alternate dot pattern, in order to take maximum profit from the 240 dpi resolution.
All this implied that the entire font set had to be designed from scratch: adding a horizontal line after every second line, adding vertical columns between all columns, a smart dot pattern for the best looking curved lines, and in addition the desire to stick to my peculiar styling opinions. A lot of hard work went into the first 24x24 version of the fonts, with DOS extension rft ("resolution fonts"). They were finished by august 1988, and updated with new characters and minor improvements until march 1990.
They actually printed faster than the original ChiWriter pft fonts: because of their limited height there was no need to print characters in two halves (upper and lower). However, after contacting Horstmann in 1988 I knew that eventually the scheme had to be abandoned, for my half-line equivalents of linedraw and mathii characters proved to be incompatible with laser printer drivers, TeX converters, line drawing modes, and the new table and box mode in ChiWriter version 4.
Around the turning of the year 88/89 there was an attempt to convert to 24x36 dots fonts, to be printed in two halves, with capital heights 27, 21 and 15 dots for orator, standard and small, respectively. But it never got further than pica fixed width fonts.
During summer 1990 I set out to design a completely new set of fonts, based on the rft fonts, only this time with matrices of 24x36 dots, to be printed in 1, 2 or even 3 parts. The first possibility could be applied to texts without orator, linedraw, or mathii, the second would be the default, and the third was useful if orator, linedraw and mathii were present, but just barely. The choice could be controlled by carefully designed ChiWriter 3 printer drivers.
For these so-called "medium-resolution fonts" (mft, between pft and laser printer), I would like to strictly follow the abovementioned conventions, using capital height standards of 27, 18 and 12 dots for orator, standard and small. The font set, supporting pica, elite and proportional style, was esssentially finished at the end of 1991, and was used by myself and some colleagues.
The font set worked satisfactorily for ChiWriter 3, and was updated until the end of march 1993, when I first installed version 4 of ChiWriter. It turned out that the version 4 fonts had changed considerably. Not only was the quality of the 9-pin matrix fonts rather good, but also with the introduction of the international extensions many characters had changed place. But once again I decided I could do better, and in the summer of '93 I began to adapt the mft fonts to the ChiWriter 4 conventions, and give them a face lift at the same time. The work continued, with long breaks until march 1995. The resulting *.mft fonts are the ones on this package. Try them out and judge for yourself.
If you don't own a matrix printer (any more), maybe you can try the special medfont style for postscript laser printers. It uses j*.mft fonts, which are *.mft fonts where all dots are doubled in horizontal direction: a laser printer can print horizontally adjacent dots, and without the doubling the fonts look grey instead of black. These fonts have the same pleasing appearance as the *.mft fonts (I think), only they look rather small on a laser printer.
Adapting laser printer fonts has been a more gradual process. I used as a starting point ChiWriter *.lft fonts for an HP-laserjet. Of course they did not meet my requirements, so I started to change them, bit by bit. They are still based on the old fonts, and bear some resemblance to their originals. Some of my requirements are still not met by these laser printer fonts, but anyway I think they are very satisfactory. Again, see for yourself.
The *.lft fonts are essentially used for all modern printers like laser printers (HP or
postscript) and inkjets.
Last updated May 30th, 2006.
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