They were actually *subsets* of what is currently on the Mac.   
Effectively, these were the Apple fonts as they were found in the  
original Mac 128K, but in Latin-1 ordering.  When I compared them with  
modern Mac fonts, even of the same name and point size, I found  
substantial differences in the glyphs, as well as many missing ones.   
In the case of the missing characters, I built the bulk of them from  
existing characters - accented characters that exist in Mac fonts but  
not Windows fonts, plus the addition of the Euro symbol.  I then  
encoded the Easterbrook copyright in the "apple" character.

In some of the fonts, there was no modern equivalent so I built many of  
the characters solely on the basis of matching style - Athens and  
Atlantis (?) for instance.

I keep getting this wrong, but I think Rob Withers and John Sarkela  
wrote the original converter, which extracted the font glyphs from the  
Windows font files into StrikeFonts.  This conversion should not, but  
may, have introduced some spacing errors. I think I wrote the Latin-1  
to MacRoman reordering code, and then I *know* I did all the manual  
work.

I suppose I had the option of just wholesale copying the current glyphs  
from the current Mac fonts into the Accu fonts, but then they would  
have no longer been Accufonts, but rather the Apple fonts again, which  
is what we were trying to avoid in the first place.

I recall at the time that the spacing on some of the characters,  
particularly punctuation, was rather odd.  At the time, I speculated  
that they were tweaked for some reason related to whatever purpose they  
were being used by Doug, but it may have indeed be an artifact from  
some tweaking for Windows or conversion.  I manually altered some of  
them, but I admit I didn't go through every point size of every font.   
Again, my concern was to make them *complete*.  I think I succeeded in  
that with the exception of one the fonts - Accula, I think.

This was so many years ago, I suppose I might have been more inclined  
to do more on them back then if there had been any substantial interest  
at the time.

I agree there needs to be a good replacement for Comic, as none of the  
Accufonts do very well there.

-- Duane

On Feb 19, 2004, at 7:37 PM, John M McIntosh wrote:

> Well speaking from the historical perspective I happen to know on the  
> windows platform they were identical to the apple offering at the time  
> of creation as rendered on the screen, pixel for pixel and width for  
> width.
>
> The characters should be formed identically to the apple ones, it  
> appears some errors or fudge or issues in converting from the windows  
> font files. Mind I do fuzzily recall I had to tweak character  
> boundaries in windows 3.0 a decade back to get things just right, that  
> might have been an issue in the conversion too.
>
> Somehow could it be too much effort to compare each apple font  
> character with the accu font equivalent character and adjust the  
> widths and padding to match? Sounds like a interesting programming  
> task.
>
> Plus pick 12, versus 10 since 12 is the default in the apple fonts  
> currently...
>
> And does anyone know if the comments found in this method still work.
>
> StrikeFont>>aComment
> 	"To read Mac font resources.
> 1) Use ResEdit in the Fonts folder in the System Folder.  Open the  
> file of the Font you want.  (A screen font, not a TrueType outline  
> font).
> &
> readMacFontHex: fileName
>
>
> On Feb 19, 2004, at 9:43 PM, Duane Maxwell wrote:
>
>> I think it's only a modest effort to get these fonts up to snuff  
>> instead of abandoning them because of a few character flaws.  Don't  
>> we all have those?
>>
>> -- Duane
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
> --
> ======================================================================= 
> ====
> John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
> Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
> ======================================================================= 
> ====
>
>