4 ms·
The Print Shop, like several other apple programs I used in the mid 1980s, transformed my interests. Before PS, I thought of fonts as highly minimal: for exampl
by dekhn 2y ago
The Print Shop, like several other apple programs I used in the mid 1980s, transformed my interests. Before PS, I thought of fonts as highly minimal: for example, the Apple IIe text fonts (https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/apple2/ https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/apple2/). When I started to use PS I immediately became interested in how fonts worked and how to render quality fonts in response to user inputs. Realistically, PS must have had lots of extra code that was not part of the Apple II operating system to render its lovely fonts (https://fiu-original.b-cdn.net/fontsinuse.com/use-images/18/18565/18565.png?filename=Google%20ChromeSnap-010.png https://fiu-original.b-cdn.net/fontsinuse.com/use-images/18/...).
After leaving Apple, I switched to PCs/dos/windows and then linux and the font story on those platforms was pretty impressive; I. ignored it for a long time, and then noticed that TrueType became a standard and all the main OSes gained the ability to render complex fonts in real time response to users.
- kosak2000 2y agoTrue, there was certainly no support in the Apple II OS for fonts. I think the OS that came with the IIGS (GS/OS?) may have had font support (but IIGS Print Shop didn't run on top of GS/OS; it booted and took over the machine). The fonts in Print Shop were bitmaps, drawn at the resolution of the target printers. The code did some modest algorithms on them for kerning, plus italic, underline, and outline style. I do recall Marty talking a lot about how the product might support resolution-independent vector fonts (this was before such a thing was a standard part of the OS). But of course modern machines caught up and later versions of the product just started using OS fonts.