Ralph Bancroft spruces up his printouts

The idea of using a word processor to produce final copy for inclusion in printed documents is attractive and using a daisywheel printer seems a solution but they are expensive and offer a limited and insubstantial choice of typefaces.

The alternative is to use the graphics and overstrike capability of a dot matrix printer. Until recently the necessary software to drive the printer has not been available but Soft Craft's Fancy Font system held out a lot of promise.

Justification, proportional spacing, wide selection of type faces and a range of point sizes are necessary features and first impressions were more than favourable.

Alas, all good stories come to an end and it was only after a longer evaluation that a couple of omissions from the package revealed serious weaknesses.

Fancy Font comes on two 5.25" disks. One holding the main programs and some of the fonts, the other holding the remaining fonts. The disks are held in a clear plastic sleeve at the rear of a ring folder that also contains the manual (typeset, as one would expect, using Fancy Font).

The documentation is well designed and presented with each chapter consisting of a general explanatory text followed by an excellent reference section giving detailed definitions of syntax and usage of each of the Fancy Font commands.

Fancy Font is by no means easy to use, which is to be expected, and a careful reading of the manual is recommended.

Fancy Font works on a CP/M micro with a minimum of 48K RAM, or an MS-DOS machine with a minimum of 128K RAM. The only printers it works with are Epsons with a graphics capability such as the FX and RX series.

To use Fancy Font, you first create your document using a suitable word processing program (notes for using the program with Wordstar are included as an appendix). You have to embed in the text the Fancy Font commands that specify typeface and size and other options like line spacing and tab commands. These commands are entered by preceding the command with a / (backslash character) or you can define an alternative character to do the same thing.

The document is then printed from within the Fancy Font program which translates the embedded commands into control codes understood by the printer.

The result, supposedly, is a document that has all the appearance of being typeset. The examples printed on this page may help you judge the accuracy of the claim.

Once you have got the hang of it, Fancy Font is relatively easy to use. The different fonts are sequentially numbered in the text as they occur. Thus /fo would be the first font used, /f1 the second and so on.

Other command characters are equally simple. r right aligns the remaining text on a line. /c centres a line of text. /j justifies the following text until a /k is encountered which switches off the justification. /b switches off the justification temporarily such as at the end of a paragraph or short line.

When printing out a document, Fancy Font expects to receive a list of parameters specifying line lengths, margins and the fonts to be used. These parameters can be specified in one of three ways. First, they can be entered on the command line when calling the Fancy Font program.

Alternatively, Pfont can be run and the parameters specified as separate command lines in response to the Fancy Font prompt (<<). This is useful for the beginner as any error message appears immediately after an invalid parameter is specified. You can also type '?' to get help if needed.

The third way is to put all the parameters into a special file called up by the Pfont command.

The choice of fonts is fairly comprehensive. Roman is the main font which is available in regular, italic, bold, superscript and subscript styles with sizes from 8pt (the text in this article is 9pt) up to 40pt (headlines in PCN range from 42pt to about 60pt). Other styles available are sans serif, old english and script together with some special characters that can be selected as a font file.

If the choice of fonts on offer are too limiting, you can either adapt an existing one or create your own using the Hershey character database that comes with the package.

There are two main limitations. The first concerns justification. A proper typesetting machine achieves an evenly-spaced effect by adding microspaces between individual letters. Fancy Font achieves the same effect by inserting microspaces between words.

The result is no better than using a standard word processor. The crucial feature of a typesetting machine is the microspacing and I conclude that to call Fancy Font a typesetting program is misleading.

The second limitation is the way it handles long lines. Fancy Font drops characters if a line is too long to fit in the specified width. The first you know about this is during printing when an error message appears on screen. You cannot specify where you want a word or line break to appear. Fancy Font just continues churning out the document - minus the characters that were cropped.

The only way round this is to run Fancy Font several times: in draft mode to check the line lenghts, in draft mode again to check that you have not made any new over-long lines, and again if more changes are needed.

Finally, you can produce the finished copy.

It is a shame that after so much thought and creativity have gone into what appears to be an innovative product, the package should fall down in two crucial areas which should be well within the technology's ability to handle.

If you think you can suffer the limitations of Fancy Font by all means go ahead and buy it. But be prepared for the drawbacks.

Features 3/5
Documentation 5/5
Performance 4/5
Usability 5/5
Reliability 4/5
Overall Value 3/5