Pointless Impressions
By Thomas Kishel
Copyright (c) 1992 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
Source: Internet
I have Pointless and it has a good and bad side.
Good
Pointless saves disk space. The old system, of having many point sizes of the same font, used exponentially more disk space for each larger font. However, TrueType fonts are just mathematical formulas of which only one is needed per font.
TrueType fonts use hinting when printing at small sizes, cheating to make it look better by fooling your eye.
Because they were first developed for the MAC, a growing number of commercial, public-domain, and shareware fonts are available. Pointless can use ANY Mac Truetype font just like a MAC.
You can save a regular font file of any TrueType font you scale, so you can use it in non GS/OS applications that may use GS fonts.
Pointless scales fonts quickly, especially with an accelerator card.
Pointless has no trouble with Mac filenames. You can put, for example, Palatino and Palatino Italic in a suitcase file on a MAC, transfer it to the GS and Pointless understands what is in it.
Bad
If a needed font is already in your FONT folder, Pointless uses this instead of making it. When Pointless makes a font from it's TrueType formula, it is stored in RAM. If you try to make an AppleWorks GS word processor file which uses many Pointless generated fonts, you might fill up your memory and crash your system. But unless you are publishing a newspaper you may never come
across that.
When you wish to print your document, Pointless has to provide a four times font size for a LaserWriter and a two times font size for an ImageWriter. This takes up time and more RAM. You might not have either.
Personally, I like it, and recommend it.
Pointless is a TrueType font renderer for the Apple IIgs. Available from II Series Software (02)606-9343

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