The Hershey Font Editor

March 1, 1997 : Release 0.1 of the Hershey Font Editor.

This is a test release of an editor for Java Hershey fonts. There are many things that don't work quite right, and loading and saving your work is a pain. This should be an application rather than a applet. It's a start. If enough interest is generated, I'll continue development. Here's a quick intro :

The font name to edit is passed in as an applet parameter, "fontname"

The lower left window is the editor window.

The upper area shows all characters in the font and is used for character selection.

The lower right window shows the character being edited in various sizes.

The lower middle area is obviously a menu with the following operations :

• In - Zoom the view in ( none of the view options change the actual character )
• Out - Zoom the view out
• Up - Shift the view up
• Down - Shift the view down
• Right - Shift the view right
• Left - Shift the view left
• Delete - Delete the currently selected line segment
• Clear - Clear the entire character
• Undo - Undo the last change
• Line - Draw a new line into the character as follows :
• Left click and release at desired position to start
• Continue left clicks to continue line. Points snap to character resolution
• Right click, or select Line button again to finish
• Write - Write the font file out to the console. ( very inconvenient )

General Behavior : Select a line segment in a character by left clicking on it. When selected, the segment is red. Move a segment by dragging it with the left mouse button depressed. The two green lines on the display represent the current minimum and maximum for the whole character set. Undo backs out changes until the character is in the original state. You cannot undo an undo. The changes you make to a character are immediatly applied to the character set even though it may not show up in the character map. If you do not like the changes you have made to a character, you must click the undo button until the character is back at its original state. If you move on to another character, the undo stack is lost for the previous character. When drawing lines, you may notice the points moving around a bit. This is because you are editing the character in the resoulution of the actual character, not the magnified view on the screen. The greater the zoom level, the more the points move.

The write button writes the definition of the font out to the console. To use the file, you must get it into a font file. To do this depends on how you are running the applet. Under Netscape, cut and paste from the Java console into a new file with a ".jhf" extension. Under Microsoft IE, the console must be enabled before running the applet. Then find the console file somewhere down under your Windows directory. Edit this file and write out the font portion to a ".jhf" file. Under appletviewer, either re-direct the output to a file or cut and past to a ".jhf" file. Only include the font definition portion.

Things left to do : Open file, write file. Duplicate, stretch, group, ungroup, circle, arc, add new character, remove character.

I've got some other pages

• I found a new security hole in Java.
• Or how about my example of a Hostile Java Mail Applet
• Here's my Spiral Font page.
• I also have the world's only only Internet accessable Bat House.
• Here's my Tumblin` Text page.
• Interested in my NervousImage Java source ?

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