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[rz2a016 at rzaix01.rrz.uni-hamburg.de]

Re: Screen fonts with diacritics for use with WordPerfect

When using the WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS) for foreign languages it is advisable to take
advantage of WordPerfect's innovative character sets system. WordPerfect already
provides many of the diacritics required for tranliterating Sanskrit and other languages.
Moreover, it provides a special character set (no. 12) for user-defined characters. For
users having an EGA or VGA display WordPerfect provides the facility to display a
maximum of 512 characters simultaneously, the first 256 being the standard extended
IBM ASCII characters and the second 256 being freely definable. The screen characters
are defined in a file called EGA/VGA512.FRS and they are assigned to WordPerfect
character sets according to information located in a file called EGA/VGA512.CHM.
Multiple assignments are possible, but only a total of 300 assignments is permitted. It is
possible to change the current screen font without leaving WordPerfect so that if for
example one wishes to write a few lines of classical Greek one can load an appropriate
screen font for the purpose and then return to one's diacritics font. A change of screen
fonts can be effected by a single keystroke by placing a suitable macro under a key. The
easiest way to make customised screen fonts (FRS files) and character set assignment
files (CHM files) is to use the screen font editor (SFE.EXE) sold by WordPerfect. This
already includes definitions of all the characters in the WordPerfect character sets. Thus,
if one needs Japanese Katakana and Hiragana characters or Cyrillic characters etc., one
need merely take over the ones that come with SFE.EXE.

Printing the characters is another matter. WordPerfect 5.1 will print a rough graphic
approximation of all the characters in all its character sets except of course no. 12, but
for really adequate results it is necessary to use either the printer's inbuilt fonts or else
download fonts. The latter can be defined by the user or purchased. Users who wish to
define download fonts themselves have several options. The usual procedure is to
purchase a font editor. Many quite adequate font editors are available as shareware. A
more challenging option is to make use of WordPerfect's powerful macro language and
create a font editor within WordPerfect itself.

The TrueType fonts provided with Windows 3.1 can be used in WordPerfect for
Windows. These are scaleable fonts that are displayed on the screen. Moreover,
WordPerfect 5.2 for Windows is supplied with the Adobe Type Manager, which enables
the user to print with Postscript Type 1 fonts even on non-postscript printers. These too
are scaleable fonts that are displayed also on the screen. It is possible to purchase
almost every font (including Devanagari) in either or both of these formats.
Alternatively, with suitable software one can create one's own fonts. Both TrueType and
Postscript fonts can for example be created using Altsys's Fontographer or Ares's
Fontmonger. With the latter Macintosh and NeXT fonts can be converted.

Ronald E. Emmerick