Re: Condensed font

On 2007-10-01 09:58:18 +0100, Martin S Taylor <hogwash@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

Rowland McDonnell wrote

<snip stuff about ligatures not relevant to my problem>

btw, I've been a bit puzzled by all this. I can't see any `condensed'
style parameter available in TextEdit's styles menu (or anywhere else I
look) - which makes me think that you've got some sort of fount
selection problem.

Nope. I can't see 'condensed' style parameters anywhere either, but it works
in all fonts. See below for more information.

<snip discussion of possible problem, now discounted>

If what you see on screen looks terrible when you've got the condensed
fount in action, try printing it out or zooming in to 400% or more to
get round the problem of low screen res.

The problem is, Martin's going to DVD and that has a lower resolution
than most monitors. And I guess the interlacing etc plays a part in how
the text is displayed.

Ah! Righto - gotcha. I see now.

Well yes, but the practical interest of getting it to work on a DVD is now
compounded by the academic interest of researching something which appears to
be a system-wide function of Apple's font handling, yet doesn't seem to be
documented anywhere.

:-)

I've uploaded some samples in various fonts here:

<http://public.box.net/box61142>

The first samples are in Frutiger and look really terrible when compressed,
but on the assumption you may not have Frutiger I've included more common
fonts so you can see the principle. As I said before, select the text, then
Format > Font > Styles...

(The actual text, in case you're wondering, is from the DVD I'm working on.)

If you open the RTF in TextWrangler (free, don't you know) it looks like some of the paragraphs have this at the start:

\kerning1\expnd-2\expndtw-10

and some have this:

\kerning1\expnd0\expndtw0

The expnd and expndtw things "compress the space between characters" according to the RTF spec. Lord knows how you specify such a thing in TextEdit, though I can see references to Cocoa's RTF code writing it.

This is a puzzle!

Cheers,

Chris

.

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