From: Michael Blair <amfortas@h...>
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 1997 05:30:05 PST
Subject: A Full Thrust Font for Ship Design?
A Full Thrust Font I used to use an Acorn Archimedes computer (see note below). This was an excellent machine for working with vector graphics and there was a wonderful drawing program that came with it which had an even better freeware replacement. Even today I have yet to see anything else touch it for ease of use and power. I used it to produce ship diagrams for Full Thrust, it had a library which allowed you to store the symbols and import them as needed. It was easy to dabble with fonts, they could be easily drawn using the drawing package and them cut and pasted into the font creator (which was free). I dabbled a little with this trying to create a font of the NATO map symbols (failed) and then tried to turn the FT symbols I had drawn into a font. It worked though it looked awful. I think the idea is still valid, I imagine that most of us would pay good money for a font that would allow you to create ship diagrams easily. This would go well with a ship design program. So if anyone out there knows anything about font design, please give the idea a go. Acorn Archimedes, is that a PC or a MAC? Neither. The Acorn Archimedes was a 32-bit RISC machine introduced about 1889 with built in scaleable fonts that are still a lot better than TTF. It was the replacement for the BBC computer that went with a mass computer literacy scheme in the Britain run by the BBC. It was the most common machine in schools and could still be as they were very robust. Incidentally RISC-OS used by the Archimedes is as far as I know the only non-American OS still extant. They are still around and still very good but rather more expensive than a PC. Apparently the processor runs on less energy than is produced by a Pentium as waste heat!