FixCystNeon

ÿþFixCystNeon is © 2010 by bobistheowl for Metaphase Brothel Graphix. All rights reserved. This font was made using MS Paint and ScanFont 3.13. FontLab Studio5 was used to adjust the UPM size. The design of this font is based on the IBM system font Terminal, c. 1981. Terminal was the default font for Notepad until Windows Millenium Edition, and it is still used in DOS Command Prompt.



This font is freeware, without restriction. If you like it, please let me know at bobistheowl@hotmail.com



FixCystNeon is one of four weights in the FixCyst family. FixCyst, as yet uncompleted, is the same as FixCystNeon, but solid, without the inline contours. It will also contain the remaining glyphs from this character set, (box drawing, happy faces, card suits, Greek letters, extended math, etc.).



The remaining two weights, NotepadClassic and DOSBoot, have glyphs 40% as large as those used in FixCyst and FixCystNeon. NotepadClassic is black text, and DOSBoot is white text on black background. These more conventionally sized fonts allow for smaller text sizes than those available in the FixCyst fonts. All fonts in the FixCyst family are monospaced, and the orientation of all glyphs, (ie: ascenders, descenders, and spacing), is as per the original source graphics. For most glyphs, all spacing is on the right side. Some letters, such as lower case i and l, have spacing on both the left and the right, by design. The baseline is higher than for other fonts, but if I had adjusted this, the white text on black background variant would have been impossible.



This is my first alphabet font, (not including Apoux, which is more of a letterbat), and I've been working on it off and on for about two years. Before I could make this font properly, I needed to acquire additional technical knowledge. I learned Windows with the Windows '95 operating system, and my first computer had Windows ME, so the basic design of this font is very familiar to me, and I hope many of you will recognize it as well. I think it looks best with bright green text on a black background, which gives it a retro pre-Windows computer terminal look.



Terminal is, perhaps, the first digital typeface. It was designed to be read at small point sizes. I've never seen it displayed at larger than 14 points. It's also a system font that has never before been available in True Type format. Each glyph can be defined within a 12x8 matrix, which includes the spacing, ascenders, and descenders. In fact, the source graphic I used for the font had the glyphs at exactly that size. For the Neon weight, the source graphic was increased to twenty-five times its' original size. In the source graphics, there is an eight pixel external perimeter surrounding a white interior.



Editing of the font with ScanFont was time consuming, but not difficult. With guidelines enabled, the more widely spaced lines defined the width of the internal white contour, which is slightly larger than the black perimeter, (nine pixels for the interior, eight pixels for the perimeter in the graphics imported into the font). In test versions, any small errors were noticeable when the font was displayed at eight point size. The copyright glyph was improved as much as was possible, but it still looks a bit off at the smaller point sizes.



The copyright, Euro symbol and upper and lower case Latin O with slash are not part of the original 254 glyph character set. I drew them in the same style as the other glyphs, within a 12x8 matrix before expanding the images twenty five times, and hollowing the interior.



I would like to extend thanks to "Toto" and Luc Devroye for assistance with some technical matters relating to the creation of this font. Much time and effort was spent in trying to integrate the 'black space' glyph, (described below), with the rest of the font. We met with less than complete success.



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This font contains a black glyph in position 124, (the bar key, (upper case of the backslash key, above the Enter key), which is used to create a black space between words, at the end of lines, or between paragraphs. Please note the limitations of this feature, and the procedure to create text with a black background. It's a bit complicated, but not difficult to do. The space bar is used between words, as usual, for text on a white background.



FixCystNeon has been designed for use with both black text colour, and with white or coloured text on a black background. At certain point sizes, (6, 8, 11, 12, 14, 18, 20, 24 or 26 points), white or coloured text can be seamlessly displayed on a black background, but at other point sizes, (9, 10, 16, 22, 28, 36, 48, and 72 points), small slivers of white will appear at the top, bottom, or right side of the black spacer glyph. This is caused by rounding of numbers in the DPI pixel values at the screen and print levels. It is beyond my abilities to fix this problem for those point sizes, If you know a solution to this enigma, please let me know, and I'll upgrade the font. There are no 'sliver' problems when using the black text colour.



To create white or coloured text on a black background, use this procedure:



1) The text should be typed in black, but the black spacer should be used between words, instead of the space bar.



2) If there isn't enough room at the end of a line to type the next word, multiple black spaces should be used to fill space to the end of the line.



3) If the text is complete, or a paragraph ends, the black spacer should be used to complete the line, or a line of black spaces should be inserted between paragraphs.



4) In many cases, it will be necessary to use the Enter or the forward arrow key to move to a new line of text, as the word wrap feature does not work properly with glyphs of the size used in FixCystNeon. I made them really large so that the inline feature would not degrade at point sizes above eight. This font is most useful at the smaller point size where white slivers do not appear.



5) After the text is complete, the text colour and black highlight colours should be selected, and applied to the text, but not to the black spacer glyph. Each word must be selected separately when applying the colour formatting, and any punctuations must also be selected separately, as if they were separate words. This sounds very impractical and time consuming for normal use, but it doesn't take that long if the font is being used in some design project.



If you are unable to see the single and double quotation marks in Microsoft Word, change this setting: Menu Bar ’! Tools ’! Autocorrect ’! AutoFormat tab ’! Replace ’! uncheck the box for "Straight Quotes" with "Smart Quotes".



Known bug: The period cannot be typed more than twice consecutively.



Notes re: character guides.



Two character guides were prepared for this font. One shows the full character set at eight points in both black text on a white background, and bright green text on a black background, plus a sample panagram with green text on black, in a .gif image. The second character guide contains the FixCystNeon font embedded in a Microsoft Word document. With the embedded character guide, you can view the full character set and panagram at a variety of different point sizes, without first having to install the font. Just select the entire document, and change the point size. Different results may be acheived if changes are made to the margins.



To embed a font in a Microsoft Word document, (for MS Word 2000 or 2003):



1) After entering text from the selected font, Go to the Tools option in the Menu Bar, and select 'Options...'



2) In the Options dialog box, select the Save tab.



3) Under Save options, check the two boxes for 'Embed True Type fonts' and 'Embed characters in use only'.



4) Click the OK button to confirm the changes, and to close the Options dialog box.



5) Save the document after confirming the changes in 4) above.



Notes on embedding:



1) Only one font can be embedded within a document.



2) Some fonts do not allow for embedding. This is a preference setting that can be adjusted by the font designer. The embedding setting can be seen or adjusted with FontLab Studio5, in Font Info ’! Names and Copyright ’! Embedding. Four options for embedding are available:



a) Only printing and previewing of the document is allowed, (read only).

b) Editing of the document is allowed.

c) Everything is allowed, (install mode)

d) Embedding of this font is not allowed.



With ScanFont, 'Everything is allowed' is the default setting, In FontCreator, embedding settings can be set or changed this way:



a) Using the Format option in the Menu Bar, select the Settings... option.



b) In the Font Settings dialog box, select the General Tab.



c) In the right hand column, you should see a section described as 'Font embedding - Licensing rights. Editable embedding should be the default setting for a newly created font, but this can be changed by the font designer to one of the other settings, (ie: some value other than 'Reserved'.



Metaphase Brothel Graphix does not endorse the alteration of embedding settings in other people's fonts, but if you have Studio5 or FontCreator, you may chose to do so. You would have to generate a new copy of the font for the changed embedding settings to take effect. You will probably find that most freeware fonts, and many commercial fonts, allow embedding. Many 'demo' versions of fonts, however, will have embedding restrictions.



3) If you install FixCystNeon, but plan to uninstall it at a future date, Select the text in the embedded character guide, and change the font in use before saving. I had problems once when I deleted a font that was embedded in a saved MS Word document. Both the document and all copies of the font on my computer were corrupted in some way. I had to delete all copies of both the font and the embedded document first, before downloading the font again. I'm not sure exactly why this happened, but be careful, so it doesn't happen to you.



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Many of the glyphs in this set can be created using the ASCII and Extended ASCII/ANSI key codes. To do this, you should first ensure that the Number lock, ('Num Lock'), key is enabled. The Num Lock key should be in the upper left hand corner of the number pad. The ASCII/ANSI codes are listed below. To create the glyphs in the list below, do the following:



1) Press and hold down the Alt key.



2) Using the number pad, (this will not work if you use the numbers at the top of the keyboard), enter the number which matches with the glyph you want to display.



3) Release the Alt key.



ASCII and Extended ASCII/ANSI key codes:



Alt + Glyph



7 " bullet

20 ¶ pilcrow

124 | black space

128 Ç C cedilla

129 ü u dieresis

130 é e acute

131 â a circumflex

132 ä a dieresis

133 à a grave

134 å a ring

135 ç c cedilla

136 ê e circumflex

137 ë e dieresis

138 è e grave

139 ï i dieresis

140 î i circumflex

141 ì i grave

142 Ä A dieresis

143 Å A ring

144 É E acute

145 æ ae

146 Æ AE

147 ô o circumflex

148 ö o dieresis

149 ò o grave

150 û u circumflex

151 ù u grave

152 ÿ y dieresis

153 Ö O dieresis

154 Ü U dieresis

155 ¢ cents

156 £ Pound Sterling

157 ¥ Yen

159 ’
Florin

160 á a acute

161 í i acute

162 ó o acute

163 ú u acute

164 ñ n tilde

165 Ñ N tilde

168 ¿ question down

170 ¬ logical not

171 ½ one-half

172 ¼ one-quarter

173 ¡ exclamation down

174 « guillemot left

175 » guillemot right

225 ß German dbls

230 µ Mu

241 ± plus minus

246 ÷ divide

253 ² two superior



Supplementary Glyphs:



© copyright

€ Euro

ø Latin o with stroke

Ø Latin O with stroke

¦ broken bar



Thank you for downloading FixCystNeon. Other fonts from Metaphase Brothel Graphix are available on our homepage: http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc/bobistheowl.html



The downloadable fonts on my homepage often include Open Type or Type 1 versions, (when they can be produced), as well as variation of the same fonts found elsewhere, but with a lower case character set. The original source bitmaps used for my recent 'Obey' series are available exclusively on my homepage, as a single .zip archive, or 'à la carte', for individual graphics downloads from an 'Index of' page.



Please note that most of my early fonts, and some later fonts where the character set is in lower case, will cause problems with Windows when ClearType is enabled. ClearType is recommended if you are using an LCD monitor. If you want to disable Cleartype:



1) Right-click your Windows desktop, and select Properties from the shortcuts menu.



2) In the Display Properties dialog box, select the Appearances tab.



3) Click the Effects button. In the Effects dialog box, you will see two list boxes with drop down menus. The second list box should be described as 'use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts', with the current selection showing as 'ClearType'. To disable ClearType, (and don't do this if you have an LCD monitor!), change this setting to Standard, then click the OK button in each of the Effects and Display Properies dialog boxes.



Display of this font, particularly at larger point sizes and in applications other than Microsoft Word, may be enhanced if smoothing of screen fonts is disabled in My Computer. To check your current setting, do the following:



1) Right-click My Computer, and select Properties from the shortcuts menu.



2) Select the Advanced tab, then click the Settings button in the Performance section.



3) In the Performance Options dialog box, look for the check box described as 'Smooth edges of screen fonts'. Changing the value in the checkbox can improve viewing of some fonts, but not others. For most fonts, you would want to have the 'smooth edges...' option enabled.



~bobistheowl

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