<font face="..."> | |
| Top | Amiga | Aweb | Contact |
AWeb 3.4 now supports the <font face="..."> tag, which allows the site author to choose the font to be displayed. However the fonts that most webdesigners specify are windows true type fonts. Such fonts are not found on an Amiga, but luckily there is a True Type font engine available on aminet. This rendering engine, along with true type fonts swiped from a windows machine will, in theory, allow you to view webpages more like the designer intended.
A good site that explains how to get started with setting up the fonts is Matthew Sealey's Amiga Web Fonts page. Another, more simple approch is described by Jorgand on his site. I'm undecided as to which approch is better.
AWeb's font handling is not yet perfect. It seems to load the fonts once, and hold on to them until you quit AWeb. TTFManager controls the appearance of any given font, however it only changes values in a configuration file. In order for these changes to have any effect, the font must be reloaded from disk. This means already loaded fonts are not affected by TTFManager, until you flush them out of memory and reload them. You must quit AWeb, do an avail flush to clear the fonts, and then restart AWeb.
AWeb's font configuration system reacts immediatly to changes you make via Arexx or via the settings window. This means loading a configuration with my script will immediatly affect all pages currently open. However this won't reload fonts from disk if they are already in memory.
I wrote a couple of rexx scripts to help set up the fonts:
The second script creates a page containing lines of text in each font you specify. A line is created for normal, bold and italic styles. Beware, the resultant html file could take a long time to load in aweb, and will use significant amounts of memory. You may have to deal with only a couple of fonts at a time if you have a slow machine. Use the command "rx fonttest.awebrx ?" to get help
The latest version of these scripts may be found here
This file contains my current font configuration and is suitable for loading with fonts.awebrx. I installed the true type fonts using a variety of metrics in TTFManager. I adjusted things so that they were all readable in 12point. I have a 19" monitor and run aweb in 1024x1024 resolution. I also have very good eyesight, and other people complain that everything is too small, so maybe my configuration is not for you. If you save your configuration (again, using my script) then you may safely see what I'm seeing. I may update this file from time to time, as I'm not currently happy with the font configuration, and I only have three truetype fonts configured.
If you come up with a configuration that you think is better than mine, then please email it to me at tom@carrott.org. Consider also mailing it to the AWeb Mailing List.
copyright 2001 Tom Parker - last modified 26 Mar 2001