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Details
FontMachine (for Psion and Compatibles) is primarily designed to display fonts on the screen of your PDA. With some printer drivers it is also possible to print scalable fonts with FontMachine.
Note: not all these font file types have been tested.
FontMachine consists of two main parts, the Control panel extension called Fonts being the visible part.
The program files take less than 190 Kb. About another 100 Kb is needed for storage per loaded font file.
FontMachine contains drivers for a number of font types. Fonts can also manage EPOC's native bit map fonts in .gdr files.
To actually use the fonts, you must select a printer driver that allows you to select extra fonts:
- The built-in General printer driver appears to be the only built-in printer driver that does not allow you to select extra fonts.
- The built-in Printer via PC printer driver will only allows you to select extra fonts after you have added fonts with PsiWin/EPOC Connect, and the only the fonts you have installed. Also note that this driver cannot print symbolic fonts.
- The other built-in printer drivers allow you to select scalable fonts.
- The PCL5 printer driver of A. Johnson also allow you to select scalable fonts, but his Canon Bubble Jet and PostScript printer drivers do not.
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Font-capable applications
The following third-party applications are known to be able to use the extra fonts.
- Pdf. You can set the fonts to use for the standard PDF Symbol and Zapf Dingbats fonts.
- Pdf+. You can use the extra fonts to substitute for all standard PDF fonts.
- Opera, by Opera Software AS. Text is shown using the font specified in the FONT tag.
- Editor, by Symbian Ltd.
Printing
Depending on the printer driver, you will also see the fonts being printed. The following drivers are known to print scalable fonts when
FontMachine (for Psion and Compatibles) is loaded.
- The built-in Printer via PC printer driver, but only the fonts that are installed using PsiWin/EPOC Connect. Also note that this driver cannot print symbolic fonts.
- The built-in Fax printer driver can print extra fonts in it's preview mode, and it is reasonable to expect that it can print them too on the Fax paper.
- The PCL5 printer driver by A. Johnson.
- The built-in HP Laserjet 4 printer driver.
The following printer drivers are known not to print scalable fonts when FontMachine is loaded.
- The built-in General printer driver.
- The Canon Bubble Jet printer driver by A. Johnson.
The other printer drivers have not been tested.
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Conversion
FontMachine (for Psion and Compatibles) itself has no influence on the conversion of a document between EPOC formats and other formats.
Whether font information is preserved across the conversion depends on the source format, on the conversion program,
on the target format and on the target displaying program.
It is reasonable to expect that font information is preserved if the fonts used are an important part of the
information in a document, for example in a text document. This expectation is met in a number of important cases.
On the other hand, if one of the formats or one of the display programs does not support user selection of fonts, expect the font information to be lost after conversion.
Testing has shown that the font names are preserved in a number of important cases when converting documents using PsiWin/EPOC Connect:
- Between MS Word 5.0, 95, 97, 2000 and EPOC Word.
- Between MS Excel 5.0, 95, 97, 2000 and EPOC Sheet.
- From EPOC Word to RTF (but not from RTF to EPOC Word).
Other effects
- Font files often contain just one font face. The Bold and Italic attributes of a font are considered to be different font faces. This means that you need to install the Bold, Italic and/or Bold and Italic font files too if you want to see Bold, Italic or Bold and Italic variants of a font.
- Don't install fonts with the same name as the built-in fonts, such as Arial. EPOC becomes confused in some cases.
- If you have a CF card and if you want to be able to remove the card and to swap it with other computers, make sure you read the accompanying manual very carefully.
FontMachine (for Psion and Compatibles) is in part based on the work of the FreeType team. Visit the FreeType team at www.freetype.org.
FontMachine (for Psion and Compatibles) is in part based on the work of Catharon Productions, Inc.
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Version: 1.05