2006-07-08 22:28:20 - Font Woes

So the website is still not launched - which is sort of silly to mention in a post that no-one but myself will see until the site actually launches.

Basically the friend which is offering to host this thing for me decided it was time to completely rebuild his webserver box, mainly because the lack of php 5.1 and sqlite3 rendered my website inoperable when served from his box. SO now I await him wiping the drive, putting the latest FreeBSD release on, and the latest Apache2 / PHP / SQLITE builds in place. At which point I can truly release this website.

NXPress is moving forward slowly. I have hit a couple of snags relating to fonts. Namely, how the HECK to make old screen-only fonts work on OS X. I need them to display, AND provide bold / italic etc. However, Espy Sans doesn't work at all, and New York doesn't provide bold / italic styling in os X. VERY AGGRAVATING. The difficulty is that Apple is finally moving away from supporting any font without a printer-font specified, and few of the fonts used by newtons / newtonbooks have printer-fonts, just bitmapped screen fonts.

The newtOS and OS9 / OSX can scale these to better / worse effect, and OS9 / newtOS can programmatically alter them to create bold weighting or italic text, but OSX doesn't work that way - its too crude for OSX. OSX demands a printer font to display on screen using the nifty rendering engines, and wants the font designers to include descriptions of the bold / italic versions inside the font itself.

So now I am NEEDING to find a way to convert these age old fonts to truetype-with-printer-font (which doesn't even have to look any better than the bitmap version), or find a workaround to convince OSX to play nice with the older font formats.

So for now, I can read the content of a book into my program, and through using the Nu-Sans demo somewhat approximate the original layout. But until I can figure out the above I cannot provide WYSIWYG editing, which is a show stopper.

Also - my program silently fails when I try to open a couple of newton book packages which are over 1.2 megabytes in size. A 1.1 meg book works just fine, so either I'm running out of space somewhere in an array / memory allocation, or the specific too large books I've tried have some funky content in their Book-Part that my parsing engine is choking upon.

Right now I'm learning how the heck the NSBrowser class works so that I can make a window that will let me drill through the newton book structure from within NXP, as my command line tool for the same purpose is too unwieldy for such large books as those that cause me problems.


Comments:

1. Tyler Nichols
Sat, 08 Jul 06 22:38:00 -0700 by Site Admin

I hate saying it, but I must: XCode's debugger is CRAP compared to that of Visual Studio.net. As much as I hate Visual Studio.net, Microsoft did do a damn good job with their debugger.


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