Writing with a word processor often means staring for hours at a video screen. For word processing, screen clarity is especially vital. It's best to have a good-quality color or monochrome monitor, but a clear, readable character set helps, too. Commodore's built-in character set works well and is especially designed for the low resolution of the average TV. However, it can be improved.
Included on your Complete 64 disk are six custom charac ter sets. Using them is easy. Rather than loading SpeedScript from the menu, select the option that allows custom charac ters. After a few seconds you'll see a message that SpeedScript is loading. Once SpeedScript is loaded, you can select which font you want to use. These are the fonts included on the disk:
1. scrawl.set 2. computer.set 3. large.set 4. speed.set 5. serif.set 6. smallcaps.set
Press the number of the font you want and hit RETURN.
The font will be installed, and the usual SpeedScript screen will appear with the new font. That's all there is to it. You're now ready to use the custom font you selected.
SCRAWLSET
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Chapter 2
Creating Personalized Fonts
Also on the disk, but not appearing on the menu, are two im portant programs: Fontmaker Boot and Fontmaker. These two program are used to install fonts you have created. To use these programs you should copy them and SpeedScript (file name SS) to a disk that contains the font you created.
Fontmaker installs a character set that has been previously created; it has no provisions for creating the custom characters.
You can easily define your own fonts or edit the supplied ones with a character editor such as "Ultrafont + " (see Chapter 6).
To run Fontmaker, load and run Font Boot (type LOAD
"FONT BOOT",8, press RETURN; type RUN, and press RE TURN again). Font Boot will load and run Fontmaker for you.
Fontmaker prompts you for the name of the character set you'd like to use. By default, the cursor blinks on the filename SPEED.SET. If you'd like to use a font with that name, just press RETURN. Otherwise, type in a new name, overwriting SPEED.SET. If you want to run SpeedScript without a custom set, just type X at the prompt (you don't need to erase SPEED.SET; just enter an X).
The character set you've previously created with a font editor program must be on the same disk as the SpeedScript program. Fontmaker looks for SpeedScript under the filename SS. Fontmaker loads in SpeedScript, bumps up the start of text space (reducing available memory by about 11K), loads the character set into that gap, switches the screen to the new character set, then runs SpeedScript.
COMPUTER.SET (designed by David Florance)
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SpeedScript
It's Only Temporary
Fontmaker does not permanently change SpeedScript unless you resave the word processor at this point (not recom mended). In other words, Fontmaker installs the custom char acter set only for the current session. If you exit SpeedScript by pressing the RESTORE key, type POKE 53272,26 to restore the set before you type RUN to reenter SpeedScript.
When designing your custom character set, remember that vertical lines appear thinner and fuzzier than horizontal lines.
Notice that every vertical line is doubled on the normal Com modore character set, making characters appear bold. You'll probably want to follow the same rule when designing your own sets. This is not a problem with crisp monochrome moni tors. You can use the full 8X8 resolution of the character grid to design clean, well-formed characters.
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r""| Another guideline for readability is that uppercase
charac-— ters should be of uniform height. All lowercase characters should be the same height, except for tall characters such as b,
!"""| d, /, h, i, k, I, and t, which should be the same height as
upper-- } case letters. Normally, you'll keep the rightmost column and the lowest row blank to keep characters from running into fj each other and to reserve room for the lowercase descenders
on the g, j, p, q, and y. Naturally, an exception is when you design cursive or script characters that should link together.
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Chapter 2
You'll also want to customize the punctuation marks and symbols. SpeedScript uses the back-arrow symbol as the carriage-return mark. If you don't like to see carriage-return marks, just blank out that character. You can put a tiny dot in the SHIFT-SPACE character to distinguish it from a real space. It can also be convenient to define some of the graphics characters to their printing equivalents on the printer. For example, some graphics characters print as italic or foreign-language characters. Just edit the graphics characters to look Uke their printing equivalents.
You can also create your own custom cursor. SpeedScript's cursor just alternates between the normal and reverse-video version of whatever character it's sitting on. The last 128 char acters of a character set are the reverse-video images of the first 128. If you want an underline cursor, just copy the nor mal set down to the reverse-video area and draw a line through the bottom row of every character. Special characters can even have a unique cursor.
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