Re: help re online fonts

["Susan W. Gallagher" <sgallagher -at- EXPERSOFT -dot- COM>]

Colleen Dancer wrote:

>We are developing a Windows GUI application and there is disagreement as
>to whether to use MS Sans Serif or Arial.  Can anyone provide information
>which is better.

I prefer Airal over MS Sans, but purely for convenience. Airal has
a larger character set than does MS Sans, so the bullet, for example,
is more accessible. Arial is slightly shorter and stockier than is
MS Sans. However, it's really difficult to tell the two fonts apart
at first glance and either is acceptable.


>Secondly I have to edit one of these fonts to create a r with a small v
>on top.  The standard in either font's "foreign" letters don't contain
>this letter. Can anyone recommend a package preferable shareware to do
>this?

If you're planning to do this for your help file, forget it. You'll
have to distribute the altered font file with your help app if you
want the special character displayed -- and even that won't work if
your end-user doesn't install the font.

As a workaround...
Once you select your font, create the special character you need
in paintbrush, crop it *very* closely, and use "copy to" to write
the character to a bitmap file. Then you can use the {bmc filename}
notation to insert the character in your help file. I've done this
with wingdings, etc. and it works acceptably well. However, note
that you'll be inserting a graphic mid-word so there'll be nothing
to hold the character strings together when the user resizes the
help window.

I don't know of any shareware font editor. Corel allows you to add
characters to true type font files and to create new true type font
files, but it ain't free.  ;-)

I don't know of any package that will let you edit a screen font
like MS Sans.


-Sue Gallagher
sgallagher -at- expersoft -dot- com