WordPerfect 5.0 fonts (52)
Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@VM.EPAS.UTORONTO.CA)
Fri, 20 Jan 89 23:18:17 EST
Humanist Mailing List, Vol. 2, No. 518. Friday, 20 Jan 1989.
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 89 14:27:54 GMT
From: Donald Spaeth x3573 <ECL6DAS@CMS1.UCS.LEEDS.AC.UK>
Subject: WordPerfect v5 fonts
WordPerfect's new fonts are a bit of nothing, I'm afraid. In
short, WordPerfect has only done half the job. They supply the
definitions for screen fonts, but NOT downloadable versions of them.
If you want these, you must buy them elsewhere.
Furthermore, although WP supplies 1200
additional characters, less than half of these are available
with EGA (you should be able to get 512, but I haven't been able
to verify this). There is no way to choose which half you want,
so if you want the full 1200 a Hercules Plus card with RamFont
must be purchased. Many of the allegedly extra characters shown with
EGA appear to me to already be part of the extended character
set (e.g. Greek); cyrillic and hebrew are not included. Finally,
a rather lengthy sequence of keypresses must be used to display one
of these characters, including its table and character number.
WP does allow the user to define new keyboards with individual
"macros" executing these keypresses.
If you ring WordPerfect technical support in the U.K. they will send
you, free of charge, a package from Bitstream which includes a number
of downloadable laser fonts, both for Hewlett Packett LaserJet II
and Apple LaserWriter. But these are for Roman fonts.
To WP's credit, IF you do find downloadable non-Roman Greek fonts,
a mechanism is supplied for storing and downloading them. How
these work in practice I don't know as I have yet to get any such
fonts (typefaces, really!).
This pessimistic and cynical account is based on my own experimentation
and calls to Sentinel (now WordPerfect) technical support in the U.K.
(tel. 0932 248488, serial number from U.K.-purchased copy necessary).
If others have had more success with the product or have experience
in buying laser printer typefaces and printing to them from WP, I
would be delighted to hear it. For the time being, I have abandoned
WP in favour of Nota Bene (on IBM-compatibles) and the Apple Mac.
Donald Spaeth
Arts Computing Development Officer
University of Leeds
email: ecl6das at cms1.ucs.leeds.ac.uk (earn/janet)