Fontmaker 1.0 History: Many years ago while the earth was still cooling, I tried to hand build a font for Sculpt 3D. It was only a simple font But soon I realized there had to be a better way. From these humble beginnings came the monumental task that evolved into Font- maker 1.0 Operating Instructions: (Batteries not included) To start Fontmaker from the workbench just click on the icon, from the CLI Just type "1.0". You will need about 1K free disk space to run fontmaker. This is because fontmaker is compiled Amiga Basic which requires .bmap files. My brother came up with a clever way to get rid of these files but at the temporary expense of 1k of disk space. This space is returned almost instantly but since things must be written to the disk it must be free when you start. You will require at least 1k to save any .seen files you create but since this is already required to start the program this should not be a problem. Once unleashed or started the Fontmaker will load a list of your available fonts and display them on the left slider. If you have a lot of fonts ( I have over 50 ) the slider will allow you to select which ever you wish to use. The current font is highlighted and a little orange line is displayed on the slider to show you where it is. The same is true for the font size except only a few fonts have enough sizes to fill the slider. To select a font or font size, just click on it. It will now be the 'Selected font' and all text will be redisplayed using it. To enter text, click on the "Enter Text" gadget. A new gadget, "Clear Text" will be displayed, and Enter Text will change to "Exit Text" You do not necessarily need to Exit text to use the other gadgets. Needless to say Clear Text erases the screen. I usually enter the text I want then try several different fonts until I find one I like. This is also a good time to play with Bold, Italics, and Underline. Just click on the ON gadget to turn them on, or on OFF to turn them off. It is interesting to note that smaller, less complex fonts usually turn out better. This is because the automatic vectorizing routines are so good that every bend and angle of a complex font is captured. This causes the resulting scene to be usually unnecessarily complected. You should experiment with this since sometimes that is exactly what you are trying to achieve. But for normal text, use a simple, small, garden variety font. Once you have the text displayed the way you want it, the next step is to enter a FILE NAME. To do this click on the FILE NAME gadget. This lights up the File Name Requester where you enter any valid file name. SCULPT 3D requires a .scene suffix, since FONTMAKER is a smart program it will add this for you. Actually you can enter the file name anytime you like as long as it is before PROCESSing the text. Now that every thing is as it should be, the text looks good, the font is correct, you have entered a file name, it is time to PROCESS it into a file SCULPT 3D can use. This is done by... Your right! The PROCESS gadget. Just click on it and sit back and relax. If you watch the Status Line and the screen, the computer will show you what is going on. I know it's not much, but at least you know that it's still working. ** A SPECIAL NOTE : The third thing it does to your text is called lining. If your text requires more than the 4000 alloted lines the status line will inform that an OUT OF LINE MEMORY ERROR has occurred. If this happens, it means that your font was to complex, your text too long, or both. To correct this, shorten your text or use a smaller, simpler font. Shortly, the status line will say "SAVING FILE XXXXX.SCENE" where XXXXX is the file name you entered previously. Then the screen will restore its self, the status line will say "DONE." and you will be ready to do another one, make a BANNER or QUIT. Please note: the output of this program is a vector outline of the font. The outline must be FILLed or EXTRUDEd or both to be of much use. If you plan to EXTRUDE, it is best to do this before you FILL. This will save tremendous amounts of memory and rendering time by not having multiple hidden faces to calculate. When FILLing, some characters may be impossible or extremely time consuming to fill; most notably, characters that have a "loop" in them for example: O, D, P. I have that if the loop is sealed off by faces created by hand to allow two non- selected vertices, it will probably FILL. You should experiment with this to see what works best. BANNER was an after thought that was added because it required so little additional programing. Really all that the BANNER does is frame your text, then instead of vectorizing it, it sends it to the printer one collum at a time. It isn't the best by far, but it works, and lets you use all your available fonts. One nice feature is that you can make multi line banners, or whatever else will fit on your printer. One drawback is that the screen pixel ratio is very much different a printer pixel ratio, this means that a height of 5 and width of 2 comes out closest to the screen. I apologize for the crudity of this, but unless the world beets a trail to my door, I see no pressing need to improve this feature. (Thank my mom that its there at all, she wanted banners for an anniversary, and it occurred to me that 98% of the work was already done.) To use BANNER, set the text up the way you would like it. Then click on the BANNER icon. After a brief pause, you will need to supply some information in the status line. Printer width (usually 80), height multiplier (number of characters high per screen pixel), width multiplier (number of characters wide per screen pixel), and finally the character you want the banner printed with (a number sign works best). If there is enough positive response to this program, a second version will be released that will have much better FILL and EXTRUDE routines built in. The preliminary work has already been done. However, somewhere you have to draw the line and release a program. If you go on improving it forever, it never gets released. Also a much faster processing routine has been proposed, but the current one was deemed fast enough for release 1.0. All I ask for is the merest pittance of money. A measly $25.00 for commercial use, and a tiny $10.00 for private use. None registering users and starving students (that's my category) at least send me a post card so that I know my child is alive and well. Those of you kind enough to pay for this program will be notified by postcard if a version 2.0 (or for that matter 3.0) is available. One more thing: if you come up with any really great images or animations, I would love to see them. If you send me a disk with COPIES of anything done with Fontmaker, I will send your disk back with the latest version) at no cost (registered users only). I would like to thank my kind, intelligent brother: Alan, for coming up with some of the better solutions. It was his idea in the first place. Maybe he just wanted me to do all of his programing for him. I also deeply thank him for writing this text file! Thanks, James Rice 123 La Paz st. Anaheim, CA 92807 (714) 637-5428 Sculpt 3D is a registered trademark of Byte By Byte. Fontmaker is copyrighted by James Rice