Chiwriter 4

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In this text file I will try to explain my motivation for designing my own set of fonts for ChiWriter, and the strict principles and philosophy I tried to adhere to in the process of developing these fonts.

ChiWriter 4.00 ChiWriter is a WYSIWYG scientific text editor for DOS. Created by Cay Horstmann in 1986, it was one of the first that could write mathematical formulas on common PC computers. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for 1990 Horstmann ChiWriter Software Ad - Now version 4.0! At the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products! Chiwriter 4.1 F/Dos - Corel FlowCharter 2.0 F/Win - Corel Ventura 4.2 F/Win - CorelDraw 5.0 F/Win - DBAse 5 F/Win - DBase 5 F/Dos - DBase III plus 1.1 F/Dos - Dac Easy Accounting 4 F/Win - Dac Easy Accounting 5 F/Dos - Device Driver Printer F/Dos&Win - Direct Access 5.1 F/Dos - FlowCharting 3.0 F/Dos - FlowCharting 4 Ver:1.02 F/Win - FormTool. 4.7 out of 5 stars. 150 global ratings. 5.0 out of 5 stars Not Just For Investigators. Reviewed in the United States on November 4.

  • All math operators, braces, brackets and parentheses are centered at mid height of standard capitals, instead of lower case letters, which is the usual practice. Personally I dislike these operators hanging partly below the base line. In lots of professional font sets +, -, * etc. are not even aligned!
  • Standard capitals are vertically centered in the dot matrix box, and so are most symbols, and of course linedraw elements. Thus all characters are aligned vertically, which facilitates fitting them together.
  • Orator, standard and small can be mixed in a more pleasing way since their heights are standardized: lower case orator equals standard capitals, and lower case standard equals small capitals. The reduction ratio from orator to standard, as well as that from standard to small is 3:2. Large lower case letters (b, h, t...) are precisely as high as capitals, and also as high as letters below the base line (g, p, y...). Even accents in international characters conform as much as possible to the standards (an accented lower case character being as high as a capital), and of course the dots in a dieresis are as big and on the same level as a dot on the letters i and j (strangely enough, this is hardly ever the case for professional fonts).
  • Lower case orator is a scaled version of lower case standard (or bold), and does not consist of capitals. The latter do not appear very pleasing to me. However, if you must, you can always use standard or bold capitals. It goes without saying that orator stands on the base line, so mixing is no problem (this was not the case for ChiWriter version 3).
  • In my opinion font types orator, small, italic, bold and underlin are meant to emphasize pieces of text in various ways. Therefore they only differ from the standard font in one aspect, but conform to the standard style in all other aspects. Thus orator and small are only scaled, bold is just somewhat fatter, italic is only slanted, and underlin is exactly the standard font with an underscore. No room for all kinds of fantasy effects here, as is the case with many professional font sets. Only the computer, script and gothic fonts have their own style. Maybe there is a need for more special fonts in the future.
  • Contrary to the ChiWriter convention, the fonts greek, script and gothic are treated as normal alphabetical fonts, in which running text could be written. That is why they have been completed with digits and punctuation marks. It is even possible to write a text in mathii capitals, although there was no room in the font for lower case, and some characters are in unusual places.
  • The greek font is upright, not slanted. The convention of using slanted greek letters probably originates from their use in mathematical formulae by typesetting systems (viz. TeX 'math mode'). I think upright characters are less distracting in texts, and, for that matter, why on earth should letters in formulae be italicized anyway? I would rather make my own choice for the appearance of mathematical quantities. Besides, operators like +, =, < are upright as well, so mixing with italics looks messy.
  • Although script letters can and will be used for mathematical symbols, their use in running text should not be excluded. It is even stimulated because almost all letters are connected when they are juxtaposed, thus simulating hand written text.
  • The former ChiWriter version 3 font foreign did not support all accented character, and in the international extensions of ChiWriter 4 fonts even more are missing (though it is a good thing that these characters are now available in many styles). In my opinion it was necessary to have all accents separately available (in the symbol font), in order to be able to compose missing combinations of characters with accents yourself.
  • As I wanted to be able to address all internal printer symbols, including the funny faces, spade, diamond, sun, star etc., these characters have been built in. To keep the printer driver consistent, also their graphic counterparts were created in the symbol font. This font also includes a quarter, half and three quarter space, besides a tie (q, r, s and t), for fine-tuning the spacing in mathematical expressions. For the purpose of screen outlining an empty (0 or 1 dot wide) character was included in the symbol font, character Q. Furthermore, the symbol, linedraw, mathi and mathii fonts are full now, all filled up with special characters I need myself sometimes.
  • In original ChiWriter fonts the average pitch of proportional fonts does not match the pitch of fixed width symbolic fonts they are supposed to be mixed with. In ChiWriter version 3 this was a nuisance: it forced a choice between very wide or narrow spacing in paragraphs on the one hand, and too short or too wide tables (relative to the right margin) on the other hand. Of course in ChiWriter 4 the problem was partly remedied by the introduction of boxes with rubber bands, but for tables and grid mode the problem remains. Therefore the proportional font width was adjusted to match the pitch of elite fonts (12 cpi).

Matrix printer fonts

Notwithstanding the fact I felt, and feel, very strongly about most of the items mentioned above, the original incentive to design a new font set was my dissatisfaction with the 9-pin matrix fonts, delivered with the ChiWriter version 2 and 3 package. I liked the philosophy behind the font set, and the font style looked rather nice.

However, the letters appeared very jagged, especially the slanted and curved ones. I reasoned that the second printer pass used, though improving the vertical resolution somewhat, still left a gap of 1/108' to the pass of the next printer pin. This was due to the fact that the distance of 1/72' between the printer pins was subdivided into 3 parts of 1/216'. The printer did not support a command for half a step move, only thirds of a step. The only remedy was to introduce a third pass. At the expense of a fifty percent increase in printing time the vertical resolution would be more or less doubled.

From the printer manual I learnt that the horizontal resolution could also be doubled, from 120 dpi to 240 dpi, just by doubling the needle speed. This implied no further loss in printing speed (only a little more noise). Since the entire font set had to be adapted anyway, I could just as well increase the horizontal resolution at the same time.

There was only one problem: in the fast mode horizontally adjacent dots could not be printed. It seemed not a good idea to let the printer decide which dots it could not, and which it could print: we would end up with an average resolution of 120 dpi. The only solution was a very carefully designed alternate dot pattern, in order to take maximum profit from the 240 dpi resolution.

Chiwriter 4

All this implied that the entire font set had to be designed from scratch: adding a horizontal line after every second line, adding vertical columns between all columns, a smart dot pattern for the best looking curved lines, and in addition the desire to stick to my peculiar styling opinions. A lot of hard work went into the first 24x24 version of the fonts, with DOS extension rft ('resolution fonts'). They were finished by august 1988, and updated with new characters and minor improvements until march 1990.

They actually printed faster than the original ChiWriter pft fonts: because of their limited height there was no need to print characters in two halves (upper and lower). However, after contacting Horstmann in 1988 I knew that eventually the scheme had to be abandoned, for my half-line equivalents of linedraw and mathii characters proved to be incompatible with laser printer drivers, TeX converters, line drawing modes, and the new table and box mode in ChiWriter version 4.

Around the turning of the year 88/89 there was an attempt to convert to 24x36 dots fonts, to be printed in two halves, with capital heights 27, 21 and 15 dots for orator, standard and small, respectively. But it never got further than pica fixed width fonts.

Chiwriter

During summer 1990 I set out to design a completely new set of fonts, based on the rft fonts, only this time with matrices of 24x36 dots, to be printed in 1, 2 or even 3 parts. The first possibility could be applied to texts without orator, linedraw, or mathii, the second would be the default, and the third was useful if orator, linedraw and mathii were present, but just barely. The choice could be controlled by carefully designed ChiWriter 3 printer drivers.

For these so-called 'medium-resolution fonts' (mft, between pft and laser printer), I would like to strictly follow the abovementioned conventions, using capital height standards of 27, 18 and 12 dots for orator, standard and small. The font set, supporting pica, elite and proportional style, was esssentially finished at the end of 1991, and was used by myself and some colleagues.

The font set worked satisfactorily for ChiWriter 3, and was updated until the end of march 1993, when I first installed version 4 of ChiWriter. It turned out that the version 4 fonts had changed considerably. Not only was the quality of the 9-pin matrix fonts rather good, but also with the introduction of the international extensions many characters had changed place. But once again I decided I could do better, and in the summer of '93 I began to adapt the mft fonts to the ChiWriter 4 conventions, and give them a face lift at the same time. The work continued, with long breaks until march 1995. The resulting *.mft fonts are the ones on this package. Try them out and judge for yourself.

If you don't own a matrix printer (any more), maybe you can try the special medfont style for postscript laser printers. It uses j*.mft fonts, which are *.mft fonts where all dots are doubled in horizontal direction: a laser printer can print horizontally adjacent dots, and without the doubling the fonts look grey instead of black. These fonts have the same pleasing appearance as the *.mft fonts (I think), only they look rather small on a laser printer.

Chiwriter download

Laser printer fonts

Adapting laser printer fonts has been a more gradual process. I used as a starting point ChiWriter *.lft fonts for an HP-laserjet. Of course they did not meet my requirements, so I started to change them, bit by bit. They are still based on the old fonts, and bear some resemblance to their originals. Some of my requirements are still not met by these laser printer fonts, but anyway I think they are very satisfactory. Again, see for yourself.

The *.lft fonts are essentially used for all modern printers like laser printers (HP or postscript) and inkjets.

Last updated May 30th, 2006.
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Fri 24 Sep 1993

Sum: P-marker, Fonts

Chiwriter 4

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

Chi Writer Writer

  • David Silva, P-Marker Font Summary

    • Chiwriter Download

  • Bill Bennett, Linguistics fonts

    Message 1: P-Marker Font Summary

    Date: Thu, 23 Sep 93 13:14:10 CDP-Marker Font Summary
    From: David Silva <davidutafll.uta.edu>
    Subject: P-Marker Font Summary
    Thank you to all those who replied to my query regarding the P-marker font.As a number of folks requested that I post a summary, here it is:
    The most common response went something like this: * If you'reusing a Macintosh, the easiest way to do graphics is to use the Drawing Toolthat's part of MicroSoft Word 5.0/.1. * After some experimenting with thelatest version of Word, I have to agree--it's quick, simple, adequate,sufficiently pretty, etc., at least for small-to-middling trees. I can wellimagine (as a couple of people suggested) that managing larger structurescould be more difficult.
    Other suggestions were to use a graphics program such as MacDraw or Superpaintand then paste the trees into the text. I've done this in the past, but Ifound it rather time consuming, particularly if you can't run Multifinder (forwhatever reasons) and you need to quit in-and-out of applications.
    Jim Black suggests a compromise of sorts:
    'I use a graphics program to draw a variety of branchingfigures, then save them as Glossary items in MicrosoftWord. ... If you draw them to correspond to a tab spacing,they can be positioned precisely, so long as your tabsettings are quite dense.'
    For those of us who have put off getting to know about glossaries, now's thetime to sit down with the manual!
    Three folks mentioned a relatively new desk accessory program calledExpressionist. From what I can tell, Expressionist was designed formathemeticians and the like to draw formulas. As Yuji Nakazato writes:
    'One of the symbols in the program is [for] drawing:A/ B CThis DA is very flexible and the above simple tree can be'nested' -- that is, you can add branches under node Band node C! Also, you can increase the number of branchesfrom one node...'
    Sounds good to me! Cathy Ball was kind enough to provide anaddress for those of you interested in Expressionist:
    Prescience Corporation939 Howard Street, #204San Francisco, CA 94104
    I've not written to these people yet, so I'm not sure what to expect.
    A final note on Expressionist--Joseph Tomei indicates that 'using it for PStrees is like killing a mosquito with a howitzer...' Apparently Expressionistis a pretty powerful DA, which means that it _could_ be used for other types oflinguistic graphics. I leave this question to future research.
    Chris Culy wrote to let me know of a HyperCard parser that he's written ...
    '... which allows you to type in any phrase structurerules and a 'lexicon'. It will then parse sentences/phrases you type in, returning a labelled bracketing,which can then be drawn as a tree.'
    For more details, please contact him directly: chris-culyuiowa.edu
    A final suggestion was to use Symantec's 'More II'. (No other info wasprovided.)
    As regards the P-Marker font itself, I had a couple of offers from folkswilling to send me a copy (for which I thank you), but I never found out WHEREthe font came from and WHERE I can get an original copy. (Could it be in theU Mich archives?) Any info on this topic would be appreciated.
    Happy Drawing, _Y'all_. (Sorry. I couldn't help myself.)
    --David Silva (davidling.uta.edu)

    Message 2: Linguistics fonts

    Date: Tue, 21 Sep 93 21:19:26 BSLinguistics fonts
    From: Bill Bennett <WAB2phx.cam.ac.uk>
    Subject: Linguistics fonts
    -COMPUTER FONTS-The impressive universality that is available from the LINGUIST BB!
    This summary of responses will be in two parts. This will be the end of thisenquiry for the present. I have more information than I know what to do with!
    (1) Responses to my -cri de coeur- includedCathy Ball <cballedu.georgetown.acc.guvax>Laurie Bauer <Laurie.Bauernz.vuw>Jim Black <jblackca.mun.ucs.kean>John Bro <broedu.ufl.circa.elm>Keith Denning <denningedu.emich.emunix>Piet Martens <pmertenscc3.kuleuven.ac.be>Thor S Nilsen <thor.s.nilsen.no.tdh>Dilworth B. Parkinson <parkinsonDedu.byu.yvax>Chen Shu-fen <sfchenuxa.cso.uiuc.edu>Ron Southerland <southerlca.ucalgary.acs>Joe Tomei <jtomeiedu.uoregon.oregon>
    Many thanks
    (2) Some general conclusions (e & e.o) - my own interpretations.1. I do not know whether I expressed my query about IPA/US phonetic fonts forPC or Mac unclearly, but it seems that the great majority of linguists areusing a Mac. No respondent specified other than IPA fonts. I assume myfriends in the US design their own Bloch/Trager? And I would hope they do soif they wish to denote the French front rounded and back mid vowels!!
    2. My main unhappiness with Chiwriter, which I am using at the moment, is thatscreen fonts are separate from printing fonts - but this is certainly alsothe case with other fonts/programs.
    3. A PC that is for fonts or non-Roman alphabets generally requires Windows.Chiwriter (for me on a PC) does not so.
    4. In general (I SENSE) freeware fonts arouse widely diversive reactions, fromexcellent to unsatisfactory.
    5. Commercial programs mentioned with often effusive favour were for Mac:FONTOGRAPHER (v 4.0) (address: Altsys Corp., 269 W. Renner Parkway,Richardson TX 75080) (street price $258), NISUS v.3.47, FONTMONGER v.1.5.7(address:Ares Software Corp., P.O. Box 4667, Foster City, CA 94404-4667)Internet <aresswaol.com> (price range $100-149.95); FONTastic; mention alsoof FontStudio from Letraset (new?).IPA Plus appears to be available from UCLA, but no more specific address hasbeen given; Powerpak, which is said to work with MS Word, MS Works, WP,Letterperfect, PlanPerfect is published by Atech Software.
    NISUS (for Mac) address is: Nisus Software Inc., 107 S. Cedros Ave., SolanaBeach, CA 92075, USA
    Mac IPA and non-Roman alphabets fromEcological Linguistics, P.O. Box 15156, Washington DC 20003internet <ECOLINGapplelink.apple.com>and at the address: Lloyd Anderson who has IPA and non-Roman alphabets.
    6. One source of IPA suggested was via John Lawler at host machine<mac.archive.umich.edu>.
    7. S(ummer)I(nstitute) of L(inguistics), address:SIL Printing Arts Department7500 W. Camp Wisdom RdDallas, TX 75236.SIL has: Encore IPA fonts (freeware)and Encore fonts (commercial).
    SIL Encore IPA fonts are up-to-date with Kiel 1990. They are available inthree typefaces:SIL Doulos (cf. Times);SIL Sophia (cf. Helvetica);SIL Manuscript (monowidth).
    F(ile)T(ransfer)P(Protocol) FTP can fetch these fonts for Macsumex-aim.stanford.edu/info-mac/font/sil-ipa.hqx.
    mac.archive.umich.edu/pub/mac/system.extensions/font/type1/silipafonts.sit.hqx
    and FTP for Windows fontsmsdos.archive.umich.edu/pub/msdos/mswindows/fonts/sil-ipa.zip
    (European equivalents:For Mac: triton.lew.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/fonts/mac/sil-ipa.hqxFor Windows: triton.lew.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/fonts/windows/sil-ipa.zip)
    The fonts can be ordered, from the address given above in Dallas,on diskette (with documentation) for $5 (plus postage: $2 in US, $5elsewhere). Another respondent advised that the IPA fonts were free, but thecomplete font library cost $60 plus postage.
    I am informed that it is useful to have an editing program with the SILfonts.
    8. Font versions of Adobe's Times or Stone for DOS and Windows:FontShop, 401 Wellington St West, Toronto, Ontario M5V 1E8, Canada.
    9. The following addresses might be of interest:IPA fonts for WP5.1 (DOS)M.A.P. Systems, 18100 Bay Rd, #100, Houston, TX 77058.
    Linguist's Software. P.O. Box 580, Edmonds, WA 98020-0580,
    10.It has struck me that, while there are useful book reviews on the BB, noregular report/review of linguistic fonts takes place. It is not theshortage of fonts which is remarkable but the confusing medley of sources,and the uncertainty of their ease/elegance of applicability.
    Bill Bennett.