NewDeal Hot Tip 1404

[Hot Tips for...] Fonts

Fonts, Text Appears Cut Off

Why does text appear cut off on screen?

The situation is due to the fact that Newdeal fonts are divided into four sections:
Accent Area
Char Area
Descent Area
Extra Below
In a text object (NewWrite, NewDraw) data in the Accent area and Extra Below area is allowed to draw over the lines above and below the line where the character with this data lies.

The important thing to realize here is that the height of the line is not affected by these areas. This means that a character with an accent on the first line of a NewDraw (or NewWrite) document will have the accent stick up into the never-land that is outside of the text object. This isn't a problem when printing because we don't clip anything when drawing a text object for printing. The drawing is clipped for display on the screen though. The result is that these accents can be hidden.

It's a drag, but to do it differently would require that we enforce some top and bottom border or margin on text objects and this introduces some complexities and also would lead to strange situations for a user (like a 1 inch tall object containing 12 point text not being able to hold 6 lines).

For fonts with correct information this can be an annoyance. For imported fonts where the height information wasn't converted correctly it can be a real mess.

If top of text appears missing when printing

This will not happen with the fonts distributed by NewDeal, but some poorly designed fonts imported to NewDeal format by other people or companies do not contain proper information about character height. They may appear okay on screen, but only the lower portion of some lines of text will print at certain point sizes. There is no way to compensate for these poorly designed fonts, but sometimes converting them to a different format and then back to NewDeal format will fix the bad height data.
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Last Modified 2 Mar 1999