Help w/fonts

[Max Pyziur]

At 12:31 AM 6/16/97 -0400, you wrote:
>OK, I'd like some help with a basic question regarding fonts and Windows
>computers (Windows 95, specifically).  At my school I have access to the
>gifted program's computer lab.  All Windows machines.  I know how to
>download fonts onto a Mac, but I need a few things addressed before I try
>to do so on a machine which is not mine:
>
>1)  I want fonts that correspond phonetically with the letters on the
>American keyboard (more or less, of course!);  I'd like basic fonts and
>cool-looking fonts.  Can anyone tell me about any of these I can download
>from the net which I can know for sure are the types of fonts that I want?

1 - I'm not sure which fonts you want Cyrillic or those for Polish, Czech
and Slovak?  If the former, then the concern is that they be in the proper
coding (a mindbender of a topic).  A coding is a set of 256 positions where
to each position there is a character of control assigned.  The first 128
positions are fairly constant with little or no variablity occupied by
latin-derived letters; the second 128 positions are where letters from
non-latin alphabets or latin letters w/ diacritics are mapped.  In this way
you can have both Cyrillic and these latin-derived (for lack of better term)
letters, or Hebrew and Latin-derived, or an alphabet of your choice other
than the character sets for Chines and Japanese and latin-derived letters
sitting in one coding.

If your interest is Cyrillic, there are between four to five different
mappings of Cyrillic to upper 128 positions.  These fall under the names
KOI8, Code Page 1251, Code Page 866, etc.  The one which has come into vogue
in recent years is the Windows standard - CP1251.  KOI8 is used for email
and Usenet postings, though there is more and more appearance of CP1251 for
email.

2 - The coding is independent of how things get mapped to the keyboard.
Keyboard drivers are the ones which run those things some which allow you to
map letters to keys as you desire and switch between one type of keyboard
and another -- this is true for both the Mac and Windows machines.  There
are some commerical ones and there are a few shareware ones.

>2)  I know on a Mac I can just dump fonts into the font folder.  I was
>told that this is now similar in Windows 95.  But do I need anything else
>to go with it?  The few WWW sites I've checked always seem to imply there
>are other techno-items that need to be installed as well.  Any clues?

3 - Probably something which unzips/unarchives.

For the three things which I mentioned above,

1 - for Cyrillic freeware fonts you may find them at www.brama.com/compute

2 - for a shareware Cyrillic keyboard driver for Win95 which accomodates
both KOI8 and CP1251 codings you may find one at (again)
www.brama.com/compute.  It's bias is Ukrainian, though.  You can use the
Character Map program which comes bundled with Windows to type in unique
Russian Cyrillic letters.

1 & 2 revisited, you can find commercial fonts of high quality from
organizations such as Parawin/Paragraph (?).  Likewsie for keyboard drivers.

2 (revisited again) - Adobe has a Cyrillic keyboard driver on its site which
they are now handing out,  (I've not tested it so I can't vouch for it), as
well as Microsoft.  If someone has more exact web coordinates, please let us
know.

3 - Probably the easiest unarchive/unzipper to use for Win95 is Winzip.  You
can find that through www.tucows.com.

>I think that's all for now.  Any help that is sent my way would be greatly
>appreciated.
>
>Devin
>
>Devin P Browne
>dpbrowne+ at pitt.edu


Max
pyz at panix.com