TO: everyone FROM: Aaron M. Contorer, author of Bradford DATE: May 1986 SUBJ: creation of fonts for Bradford Greetings! Last year I released Bradford 1.20, the near letter quality program, to bulletin boards as "freeware," with the idea that everyone could use the program free of charge, and if they liked it enough to want to use its advanced features, they could order the manual from me for U.S. $15. Since that time, I have received orders for hundreds of Bradford manuals, as well as nice letters from people who did not wish to order the manual but were successfully using Bradford. Many of these letters contain suggestions or requests, and the most popular idea has been that I let everyone know how to create and edit fonts for Bradford. In response to these requests, enclosed herewith is Bradcon, the program I use to make all Bradford 1.20 fonts, as well as the source code for Font 1 (Typewriter) to help you get started. Please use Bradcon all you like, give copies to all your friends, upload it to bulletin boards, distribute it in software libraries -- in short, help make it available to everyone, just like Bradford. There is no manual to buy; this file contains the instructions. Of course, I would hope that some people who found Bradford "not quite valuable enough to order the manual for $15" before will change their minds after acquiring Bradcon, but that is essentially beside the point. But wait -- there's more! Included herein is not only Bradcon, but also a whole collection of new fonts created by me and/or my good friend and cohort-in-computers, Chuck Copeland. The fonts are as follows: 8, Smallcaps. This font was already released with some copies of Bradford, but not all, so here it is for everyone. It's based on Vanilla, but the lower-case letters are replaced by miniature capital letters. 9, Orator. This is like Smallcaps, but everything is taller. The lower-case letters are almost as big as normal capital letters, and the capital letters and other full-height characters are even bigger. This is the largest Bradford font. It's made to attract a little more attention and to be especially legible. A, Pizza. (Yes, Bradford fonts can be named with LETTERS as well as numbers.) This is a very clean-cut font (with some resemblance to Helvetica, for those of you familiar with commercial typefaces), and is the FIRST Bradford font whose general shape is not based on directly or indirectly on Font 1, Typewriter. B, Jazz. This is a type style popular in the United States in the 1920's, and gaining some popularity again. Characters are generally very thick on one side but thin on the other side. C, Italic Typewriter. This is similar to Font 6, Italic, but the characters have serifs (those little decorative line segments attached to the ends of many letters) as in Typewriter. ---------- I hope you enjoy all these new fonts, free of charge. If you wish to have the source code for all the Bradford fonts, 1 through C, on a disk, you can order them from me by sending your address and a check or money order for $20 in United States funds to: Aaron Contorer Bradford 1.20 font disk 1521 Central Avenue Deerfield IL 60015 USA Make the check payable to me or, if business purposes require that you write a company name, make it payable to Concom Enterprises, which is my company name. If you live in Canada, a Canadian Postal Money Order is an easy way to send U.S. funds. Having the source code for the fonts is NOT necessary to print with them; rather, it is an easy way to see how different fonts are designed, and will give you a strong starting point to design your own fonts, as well as allowing you to edit the standard Bradford fonts. Be sure to tell me WHAT KIND OF COMPUTER and WHAT OPERATING SYSTEM you need the disk for. I can supply a variety of 5.25- inch (13.3 cm) disk formats. The source code for the fonts is copyrighted and may not be distributed through bulletin boards, software libraries, etc. The source code for Font 1 is included herewith, so that should give you a good idea of the type of thing you'll be getting and whether it will be useful to you. ---------- Before I get on to how to use Bradcon, I thought this would be a fine place to answer a few of the frequent questions I get from users of Bradford 1.20. So here are some interesting tidbits: Bradford received its name at random. I liked the name, and I didn't want to call it "Dot Daisy" or "MatrixPrint" or some of the other silly things that I could have called it. The Pizza font was also named at random. Chuck and I were discussing possible names for the font over a large pepperoni pizza, and we weren't having much success coming up with a good one. Hence: Pizza. (If anyone comes up with a really nifty name for this font, let me know, and maybe I'll change it.) Bradcon is just short for "Bradford conversion program." Bradford will NOT work on a Gemini-10. It WILL work on a Gemini- 10x, which is quite different. The list of Epson-compatible printers that people have told me they are using with Bradford is very long. In addition, Bradford is being used on a great variety of CP/M machines, not just the Kaypro; and a great variety of MS-DOS machines, not just the IBM PC. Bradford was written completely in Turbo Pascal. Some bulletin boards received copies of Bradford without the accompanying information file. If you have a copy of Bradford and don't know what to do with it: the manual is available by sending U.S. $15 to the address given above. Bradford fonts must be named FONTx.BIN, where x represents any letter from A through Z or any number from 0 through 9. Bradford does not know the English name (e.g. "Typewriter") of any font. It only knows their letter or number. There were only fonts 1 through 5 when Bradford was first released; hence, only these show up on the screen. But just enter any character, 1 through D, and it will work. ---------- And now, on to how to use Bradcon! Bradcon reads the source code for a font in the form of a text file, which must be named FONTxB, and creates the usable font file (FONTx.BIN) as binary information. The x in the two file names will be the same. The source code consists of 1520 lines of text, 16 each for the characters space (" ") through tilde ("~") in order of the ASCII character set. The characters are shown on the screen as they will look on paper, with a space representing blank area and a lower-case "x" representing colored-in area. The width of each line in the text file should be no more than 9 characters; any text past the ninth column will be ignored by Bradcon. See FONT1B in this group of files as an example of a correct Bradcon source file. Once you have created a source file, run Bradcon just by typing 'bradcon' and hitting Return at your operating system prompt: A>bradcon Your file must be in the currently logged drive and directory (or area) before you run Bradcon, and it will output the .BIN file in the same directory or area. So if your file were on drive B and Bradcon were on drive A, you might do the following: A>b: B>a:bradcon Once Bradcon runs, it just asks you to enter a font number. Press 0 through 9 or A through Z on your keyboard, and it will be off and running. Font conversion does not take very long, and you will be returned to the operating system prompt when it is done. That's all! Now you have a new .BIN file to use with Bradford. Remember to copy the file to the same place where your other Bradford fonts are located. Please enjoy and use Bradcon for yourself and give copies of it to others. You may NOT sell the software; you may only give it away, in the spirit of Bradford. If you create any NEW fonts, not based on one of the fonts supplied by me, you can do with them whatever you wish. I hope you'll give them away.