Font-o-matic ReadMe                  November 17, 1993

Thank you for purchasing Font-o-matic and for reading this 
ReadMe. Font-o-matic is so easy to use that you probably 
won’t need technical support. We have included some great 
tips in the manual for printing complex characters and 
speeding up the program. However, should the need for tech-
nical support arise, we have arranged for a special support 
number. We will be taking your calls between the hours of 
9:30am and 5:30pm Central time on weekdays. The number is 
1-214-680-1726.

As usual, we can be reached via US mail, delivery service, 
or cattle drive at Altsys Corporation 269 W. Renner Pkwy 
Richardson, TX  75080. Our fax # is 214-680-0537. You can 
email us on CompuServe at 76004,2071 or on America-On-Line 
at ALTSYS.

Sounds!!!
We really want Font-o-matic to be a moo-ving experience for 
you, so if your PC has a sound card, then turn up the volume 
when you run Font-o-matic. It has some really cool sounds and 
music!!! You can even change the sounds if you want to: just 
replace our WAV files with your own favorites. If you don’t 
want any sound then you can turn it off via the Goodies menu. 
If you like most of the sounds, but don’t want to hear a few 
of them, then you can just throw away the WAV files that you 
don’t like. Have fun listening!!!

User’s Guide Additions
This ReadMe contains important changes and additions to the 
Font-o-matic User’s Guide and should be used along with the 
User’s Guide for optimum benefit.

Page 3. "Using Font-o-matic: The Controls"
The undo button was a casualty of user interface refinement. 
So don’t look for it in the program - it’s not hiding under a 
pile somewhere, it’s just not there. 

Page 4. The Effects Controls are the sliders used to modify the 
effects. The degree of the modification is shown by either a 
numerical value (as in skew & rotate) or some cleverly descrip-
tive term such as "Gilligan thin" or "A tad high." You may 
notice that there are about 20 descriptions for each slider. 
These descriptors will help you recreate the settings later.  

Page 5. Effects can be deleted by clicking on the effect's icon 
in the Effects List and selecting "Delete" from the Edit menu (or 
hitting the Delete key on your keyboard). 

Page 6. Printing a font.
The Print dialog now has an "Adjust Spacing" checkbox just like 
the Save Font dialog. Rather than saying "recommended," it is now 
checked by default.

Page 7. Saving a font
We have set up "Just certain letters" as the default option. If you 
choose to override this default, please be aware that generating an 
entire typeface can take a great deal of time, depending upon the 
effects you have selected. On a reasonably fast 486 machine, most 
fonts with a single effect will take from 3 to 10 minutes to generate. 
If you want to generate fonts with stacked effects, it can easily take 
over 30 minutes. (In fact, true masochists can stack the really 
complex effects like Swiss Cheese, Cow, Stripes, or College and create 
a font that will probably need all night to generate!) The results will 
be even slower on 386 machines. For more on the subject of Speed, and 
how to get around some of the traffic jams, see the User’s Guide page 
11.

When modifying a PostScript font, you will notice that the fontname has 
an ‘A’ appended to it. We add that to prevent the accidental overwriting 
of your original PostScript font. We hope that you will change the name 
to reflect the modifications, and in doing remove the A. But, if you 
forget to change the name, you will at least not be writing over the 
original font. 

There is another choice you can make on saving a font, called "Save 
slower (higher quality)." You should check this option if you are having 
problems getting your Font-o-matic fonts to work correctly or if you 
have a lot of free time. This command does what we call Remove Overlap 
and then Clean Up Paths. These are two really cool functions that first 
perform a logical union on all the paths (which removes overlapping areas 
and consolidates a lot of the paths into simpler ones), and then gets rid 
of points that aren’t needed. Remove Overlap, by the way, is also found 
in our high-end font editor, Fontographer. Your fonts will often be 
better off for this option, but as any Fontographer user could tell you, 
these operations exact a certain performance penalty. So if your fonts 
are all working well, don’t bother. If you generate a font which doesn’t 
work that well, try opening that font back up in Font-o-matic, and saving 
it WITHOUT applying any effects using the "Save slower (higher quality)" 
option. It may still be that the font is too complex for the Windows 
TrueType rasterizer. If so, then you’re pretty much stuck with either 
redoing the font using less extreme values in the effects, or creating a 
Windows MetaFile instead of a font.

If you are printing to a PostScript printer, it is highly advisable to 
use the "Save slower (higher quality)" option. This is because PostScript 
often chokes on overlapping paths. There is a way around this, but it 
requires changing your Printer options in the Control Panel. See page 
13 of the User’s guide for instructions on sending fonts to the printer 
as PostScript Type 3.

Page 12. Displaying Complex letters on screen.
The first complete sentence at the top of page 12 should read: "When 
the TrueType rasterizer is overwhelmed by a letter’s complexity, Windows 
displays the letter as a rectangular open box." We have tried Windows 
NT on the same letters that give us boxes in Windows 3.1 and we do get 
letters in NT, so we have high hopes for future versions of Windows. 
Also, since the difficulty in rasterizing a letter is influenced by the 
point size, a letter may display properly at smaller point sizes, then 
change to a box at larger point sizes. This is typical behavior. Even 
though the letter appears as a box on screen, it may still print 
correctly.

Page 12. Printing
Stacking 3D on top of Wave on a Script font will, for some settings, 
result in an error message on your printer. As we point out in the 
User’s Guide, there are some things you can do with the Win.ini and 
Printer Setup to increase your chances of printing, but for many 
fonts, it won’t help. For this reason, we have included Windows Meta 
file (.wmf) output. The .wmf can be imported into most applications 
and print successfully. Use this .wmf file if you need a mangled, 
waved, 3D script font at 200 points!

Page 14. Multiple effects
The behavior of the effects may be confusing when deselecting "Stack 
effects." If you have stacked three effects and then deselected "Stack 
effects," the currently active effect will be replaced by the next 
effect you choose. The currently active effect is easy to recognize--
it is the one that’s highlighted in the effects list. 

If you have several stacked effects and want to get back to only one, 
simply select the unwanted effects in the effects list (at the top 
right side of the Letter Preview area) one by one and delete them 
using the delete key or Delete from the Edit menu. Of course, be aware 
that stacking lots of effects is a good way to make your 486 behave 
like an 8086!

The End
If some of these declarations seem like bad news for you, please 
understand that this level of technology has a cost (typically in 
speed). When you push against the envelope, you’re sometimes gonna 
get stamped. For a frame of reference, just the stripe effect can 
require over 400,000,000 instructions at the change of a slider 
position! The performance, display, and printing all have ‘gotchas’ 
because we are outputing fonts. We are using a mode intended to 
display plain roman type to drive a cow through. Remember, you bought 
Font-o-matic because you wanted to do cool stuff with your fonts, and 
retain them as a FONT. Whenever possible, we have done just that. 
Please be patient with those operations that may take some time. We 
hope you can appreciate the technology while waiting for the prized 
outcome, and remember--this IS fun!

Altsys Font Products Team
Pete Mason, Product Manager