Re: Fonts for NB

["Bill Troop" billtroop@xxxxxxxx]

Michael, thank you for re-sending that snipped from NB's tech support.
I had missed it. It is the most pathetic confession of total
inadequacy I have seen in 20 years of computer journalism. No wonder
this company is going nowhere! Of course the entire program needs an
entire rewrite! Land sakes! With the GPFs mentioned before, this
sounds like a minimally modified XyWin, with all the fundamental
problems intact.

'huge performance hit' indeed! What absolute garbage. How can they
think anyone would take this seriously? Or is their business model to
prey on the unsound of mind? Bad enough if it doesn't work with
Verdana -- but not with PS Courier either? Then it's not to to be
taken seriously. We're better off with XyDos!

What's so tragic is that IF XyWin had been rewritten, in the mid-90s,
as it easily could have been, to take on the kind of functionality
present in Quark 3 . . . . . we'd be seeing a lot of book and magazine
publishing being done that way -- still. And there's no excuse for the
NB people not to have been doing this all these long, long years.

What is so sacred -- at this point -- about anything in the original
code? The screen routines were never good enough for anything but an
early Win95-era program anyway. Font handling is a joke -- where's
kerning? not to mention OpenType, Unicode, typographical and
contextual support . . . . these are basic expectations today.

After all of that, I have a fear about the font generation: have we
any indication that FontCreator is _not_ stripping out high-level
hinting info from Verdana? Or that the modifications aren't
conflicting with that in some way? If you feel like it, email them to
me and I'll get someone to check them out -- I couldn't do it myself.
By the way, modifications of Verdana were, generally speaking,
permitted under some of the earliest licenses but I do not think they
are permitted under the current licenses. That said, nobody at MS or
Monotype cares what a couple of XyWin/NBWin users are doing with their
fonts. I seem to recall that as ClearType evolves, hinting is becoming
less and less important . . . . .