A/UX and font display anomaly

[beachycove]

Don't know what else to call this -- Quickdraw anomaly, perhaps?

I have just gotten around over the holidays to installing some productivity software on an A/UX machine, a Quadra 950 with the AWS95 (Pisces) card installed. It is connected to a Philips 150s LCD @ 1024x768 through a KVM, with the necessary monitor adapter in the mix for sense codes and such (on which my LCD is said to be a 19-incher).

Regular System 7 machines work just fine with this setup — though amusingly, I could not get any Apple-branded display other than one running at 640x480 to work. Happily, the Philips has an autosetup button which works like magic, and adjusts the monitor to what is coming from the machine through the KVM.

Alas, there is a problem: text does not display properly in a word processor, in this case Word 5.1a, unless I use Courier. I have turned off fractional widths etc., all to no avail.

The Word installation was done in the user directory; fonts have been installed both in the root System directory and in the User's directory (in the stock Applications directory) with no difference discernible in the display anomaly.

It is hard to imagine that people who said over the years that System 7 era applications work fine on A/UX have overlooked this problem, because it more or less makes the application unusable, so they must not have had it. What have I done wrong?

I have a spare Quadra 800 with an A/UX installation that I can experiment on, if someone could make some suggestions....

 

[beachycove]

I now believe the problem to have been caused by use of Truetype fonts (and possibly by where they were and weren't placed). A/UX seems much happier with bitmapped fonts.

Ho hum, no Hoefler Text for me.

 

[beachycove]

Actually it's only some TrueType fonts. Hoefler Text is anomalous because of the GX glyphs, but some others are also unhappy, like a TrueType version of Times. Very odd but I have it working.

 

[ChristTrekker]

I don't think the FAQ makes any mention of Truetype problems.

 

[beachycove]

No it doesn't, and there aren't supposed to be any. However, I sure had them. To take an example, if I italicized a word, it could go

d

o

w

n

the left side of the screen one minute and then jump up onto the line like it's meant to the next. Or back down again. Some text would randomly resize. Or text would print off the page or display at the wrong point size. So some TrueTypes just wouldn't work.

No idea what was going on, though I speculated in the original post that it might be the font's "extras" that caused it (Hoefler Text was created as a sort of showcase for QuickDraw GX — meaning that mostly we don't see what it can do). When having these issues, I was using Hoefler Text from 7.5 and (as I recall) a bog-standard Times New Roman, which I think came from Microsoft because they were tired of paying royalties to Rupert Murdoch for Times. The fonts were stored in my user system folder (i.e., not root); the Word 5.1a application software being used was installed on the MacPartition, after having booted only into MacOS rather than A/UX. I think that is all the kosher way of doing it.

Subsequently, as posted elsewhere, I discovered Verdana and Georgia, and these are just wonderful on the old screens and systems. They are TrueTypes, and they work fine in A/UX.

 

[ChristTrekker]

Added a small note to the FAQ about this.