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| Printer Font Designer (Computing with the Amstrad) | Applications Divers |
COLIN JONES provides three routines to add a new dimension to your dot matrix printer PRINTEXT, Fontdes and Font-prod are a set of utilities which allow you to print, in large character sets of your own design, any text files saved in Ascii format from word processors such as Mini Office II, Tasword and Protext. The files are printed 40 characters to the width of the page and the programs work with Epson-compatible dot matrix printers capable of eight dot graphics mode. Best results are obtained with fully compatible printers which give 480 dots per line with the Esc+K graphics control code. Those printers not fully compatible which give 640 dots per line in this mode should still work, but will give a printout that doesn't cover the full width of the page. Program I - Printext - prints your text file and to do this it needs a font (or set of character designs) with which to display the text. So before you print a file you need to design a font with Program II - Fontdes. As this can be a time-consuming task, Program III - Fontprod - is provided as an optional extra. It simply produces a font based on the Amstrad's internal character set and saves it to tape or disc ready for use. The disadvantage of this method is that the font isn't as good as one you've designed yourself, but it's an easy way of getting started. The font produced by Fontprod can be loaded into Fontdes and used as the basis for your own efforts. You'll find modifying an existing font a lot easier than designing one from scratch. If you want to take this option, type in Program III and run it on a reset machine. After a short delay it will save the font as rom.fon. The program must only be run once, and afterwards you will find that some characters such as q, g, y and j will be altered. If you need to run it more than once, maybe because you had to correct typing mistakes, save the program, reset the computer and reload it. And when you've finished with Fontprod, reset the computer before doing anything else. Designing your own font with Fontdes can produce very impressive results. When you run it you will see a 16 x 12 matrix in which to design characters. You can see the screen in Figure I. Press X to get to the menu, where you will be presented with four options. You can load a previously-saved font such as rom.fon or save the one in memory. Note that fonts are all saved with the extension .fon, but whenever you are asked for a filename just use the first part of the name, in this case rom The third option is to select the character you want to edit - press the appropriate key. Finally you can return to the editing screen. Although the matrix is displayed as 16 dots high, you can only use the middle 14. This is because the distance from the top of one row to the top of the next is 16 dots but when printing characters the Amstrad works The cursor is moved around the gric with the arrow keys and pixels are plotted or unplotted with Copy. Don't forget to save your font before leaving the program! In fact, to be on the safe side it's a good idea to save your fon! after editing each character. If you have previously loaded a font, pressing Return when asked for the filename will save it under the previous name. The next step is to print your text file out with Printext - Figure II gives you an idea of the sort of results you can expect. The file you are going to print must obey certain rules:
When the program is run you will be prompted for a font name and the name of your file. Remember that you don't type in the extensions fon and txt, just the forenames. If your file is long and runs over more than one page, the program will pause with an appropriate message while you insert another sheet of paper or wind the printer on to the top of the next sheet if you're using continuous stationery. With these three routines you can now bring your dot matrix printer to life and produce your own distinctive, classy text.
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