Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl
From: bowman@apl.demon.co.uk (Dick Bowman)
Path: watmath!watserv2.uwaterloo.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!malgudi.oar.net!caen!uunet!pipex!demon!apl.demon.co.uk!bowman
Subject: Re: fonts for APL 
Distribution: world
References: <1993Jan6.185017.1040@csi.jpl.nasa.gov>
Organization: Dogon Research
Reply-To: bowman@apl.demon.co.uk
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Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 20:52:13 +0000
Message-ID: <726353533snz@apl.demon.co.uk>
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APL TrueType fonts DO exist. Adrian Smith has transmuted his old Postscript
font, and I believe that there are other similar transmutations. I have had
a test copy of Adrian's which looked very good when printed, but was less
appealing on the screen. I believe that he is planning to improve it, and
that if so, then it MAY be bundled in with a Windows interpreter 'soon'.

There were a few other problems which caused me to sideline using this font,
but it could be reasonable to assume that they will be fixed in a later
version.

An idea which somebody ought perhaps to pursue is purchasing a copy of a
package like Fontographer which allows you to design your own font. After
all, if this machine can be clogged up with several hundred 'normal' fonts
why should I be satisfied with just one attempt at an APL font.

But, to play well into the hands of the J people; one unpleasant problem I
met was that the APL character set needs to use the Ctrl- and Shift-Ctrl-
augmented keys and I have not so far been able to persuade Word to produce
anything from such keystrokes. Anyone who can do this, please share your
insight. Drag-and-drop from the character map is just not on. Which made it
all far too tedious to do adhoc APL inserts into documents. But DDE worked
well from Dyalog, and dumping code out to file and importing it worked almost
as well.


