Fonts for the Newton

Here are two sets of fonts for the Newton: laser printer fonts and a customized Chinese font.

Sean's Special UniTaipeiX Font

UniTaipeiX is a popular Chinese font for the Newton. However, standard versions of this font have a special installation script which replaces the Newton system fonts so Chinese can be displayed in buttons, menus, etc. But this breaks some applications. My version of the font does not have this installation script -- it's just an ordinary Newton font just like any other. Perfect for learning Chinese.

Where to get other Chinese Fonts

The best place to go is Joseph Chen's chinese software page. Other than my font, one font in particular which you might like is the Uni24Lite font, an 18-point chinese font which looks really pretty, but has only a limited number of characters (the most common ones).

Japanese Fonts. You might also be able to use Japanese fonts, which contain much of the Chinese character set. Tomoyoshi Murai lists a wide range of Japanese fonts, and six different Japanese input systems.

Download Sean's Special UniTapieX Font

...you can also download the source code for this font, as UniTaipeiX.source.sit. This is a modification of free code given to me by Joseph Chen and has been posted without his consent (I can't get ahold of him), but I think it's reasonable at this point. However, note that while I modified the original source code to remove its hack that replaced system fonts with UniTaipeiX, the original documentation hasn't been touched -- and so it gives all sorts of warnings that are no longer necessary.

Laser Printer Fonts

This is a collection of PostScript Laser Printer font bitmaps for the Newton; these fonts are the full set of fonts that most Apple LaserWriters (and many other PostScript printers) have built-in. These aren't just your usual fonts -- instead of relying on the Newton's nasty boldifying and italicization algorithms, these fonts come with their own bold, italic, and bold-italic bitmaps whenever appropriate. This both looks better on-screen, and provides the correct metrics for printing to laser printers. The bitmaps in these fonts are courtesy of Nathan Labhart. I made (most of) them printable to the LaserWriter, and fixed some bugs.

The fonts have been compressed for Newton OS 2.0, so if you want them for your 1.3 Newton, you'll need to grab the source, open each project file, go into the Project Preferences, turn off the "Newton 2.0 Platform Only" button, and recompile the project.

Important Things to Know

• These Fonts Print 10% Too Small. This is on purpose. The Newton's PostScript printing metrics are slightly off: it actually prints at a slightly larger size than thinks it's printing, and it sets its spacing metrics accordingly. This results in clipping of words on the right-hand side; perhaps you've seen the problem when printing with the Simple font, for example. But this is especially problematic for wide or monospaced fonts, such as Courier. To compensate for this, these fonts have been set to print 10% smaller than their true point size. Hope that's not a problem.
• Zapf Dingbats and Symbol Don't Print to PostScript Printers (Yet?) At least my Apple LaserWriter Select 360. Well, actually Symbol prints, but all you get are punctuation marks. :-) I'm not positive why, but I believe it may be because Symbol and Zapf Dingbats have their own Unicode areas, and the Newton is trying to be too clever. If anyone can give me a clue here I'd appreciate it.
• NewtWorks Doesn't Print Fonts Correctly to PostScript Printers. NewtWorks has a serious bug (a rounding error, probably float->int) in it that causes it to incorrectly measure the width of bold, italic, etc. styles. It looks fine when displayed, but when it comes to print on a PostScript printer, chunks of text may overlap or have unsightly gaps where text suddenly changes from one style to another (bold to plain for example). This problem is especially problematic for Courier. This problem does not occur with the Note Pad.
• Courier, Helvetica, and Times Have Only a Plain Bitmap at 9pt. So at 9 point, plain looks great, but bold and italics' metrics are a bit off (but heck, the other fonts don't even have a plain bitmap at 9 point...). Just so you knew.
• Zapf Dingbats, Zapf Chancery, and Symbol Are Only Plain. You purposely cannot set these fonts to anything other than Plain (well, you can, but they'll still appear Plain), nor can you print them to anything other than Plain.
• Newt's Cape Recognizes These Fonts. If you have them installed, it'll properly display them in its temporary and permanent books if they're requested with a FONT FACE directive. For example: this is in Courier. Some people don't like the resultant tight line spacing. As of version 2.0u-2 of Newt's Cape, there is an option which may help you if you find this feature a pain. If you set i:General:OtherOptions:Ignore Font Face to some non-empty value, then Newt's Cape will map Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif, etc. to "Simple", Times etc. to "Fancy", and TypeWriter, Courier, Monaco, etc. to the PRE preference. That is, it will do some intelligent mapping, but won't use your built-in Helvetica, Times, etc. fonts.

Where To Get Other PostScript-Printable Fonts, Etc.

• The only known sample Newton font code from Apple is the MonacoTest code; its last version is v5. This code shows how to embed and auto-install a font in your application. It contains a subdirectory with the actual Monaco font, which will be the useful part for you. MonacoTest also shows one way to set up a font for printing to Postscript printers.
• Besides a number of Cyrillic, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese fonts, the chief Roman fonts for the Newton are:
  • WriteStuff by LandWare contains TypeSet, a collection of LaserWriter fonts that LandWare claims properly print.
  • Works Better by Standalone contains fonts for the Newton; I don't know if these print to a Laser Printer nicely or not.
  • Newton's Prism has several freeware fonts for the Newton, but to the best of my knowledge none print to a laser printer (certainly Klingon and Symbol don't) :-(
• Apple has a small program called the Newton Font Tool for generating the resource files used in creating fonts. But Apple's Newton Font-making instructions suggest that you use more traditional tools instead. Unfortunately neither the tool nor the instructions explain what to do with the raw font resource data once you've generated it. :-)

Download

You can download each font individually, or together as a Stuffit package. Note to archivers: please do not archive these fonts.

You can also download the Source Code to these files, as PostScriptFontsSource.sit.