Is it just me or what gives? I've been using the standard two fonts that Cadnetix has available on the system. You know... SIMPLEX & ITALICS.
I don't know about you, but I think that the simplex is a bit blocky, and unattractive, and the italics is a bit overkill.
I discovered something interesting the other day... there are other fonts that exist on the system. That's right, there are six total fonts on the Cadnetix system... and this includes the ol' 50000S (Version D), too.
OK... so just where are these fonts, and how do I use them?
The easy part is finding them. On the Sun Sparcstations, they are in the /home/cdxdata/data/fonts subdirectory. They are listed as simply font0, font2, font3, font4, font5, and font6. The system defaults to using font0 and font5, as these are the SIMPLEX and ITALICS fonts.
Here is a description of all of these fonts in DTP lingo...
FONT0 - Hershey
FONT2 - Helvetica
FONT3 - Helvetica-Bold
FONT4 - Times-Roman
FONT5 - Times-Roman-Italics
FONT6 - Script
OK... so maybe it's not 100% DTP lingo, but it's close... you get the idea. The Hershey font is a PD (Public Domain) font that has been around for some time, the script font looks like hand-writing, and you know the others.
This means that there are four other fonts that could be used.
The system can use the other fonts... but can only use two of the total six fonts at a time.
(WARNING!!! The following contains information that could cause you to possibly destroy data on your system. Proceed at your own risk!)
We might want to substitute Font6 for the Italics font5. To do so, we need to log in as 'root', and cd to /home/cdxdata/data/fonts. We then need to mv font5 to font5.bak. Next, mv font6 to font5. Viola. You will now see a script font everytime that you select italics. (Note: use 'mv' to preserve the file dates. 'cp' will use the current date and time... not recommended.)
You will notice that the fonts are dynamic. That is, if you had created some text previously using the italics font, and now you have substituted the script font for the italics font, all of the text that was in italics, will now be in script.
Is there a use for this tidbit of information? Sure there is. I don't know about you, but I can spot a Cadnetix layout a mile away just by looking at the fonts. So, confuse someone... be different. Change the fonts.
As an aside... I've noticed that Cadnetix is able to use these other fonts in a couple of their postprocessing programs... like the penplotter program. Evidently, they meant to expand the font selection thru software control... like they now select the two fonts. They didn't, or else I slept thru that class.