Font Frustration!

 

Publisher: Nexus Publishing, 101 Webster Road, Walsall, West Midlands, WS2 7AP Telephone: 01922 442597 Email: davehowell@cix.co.uk Cost: £10.00 - free first year membership, £10.00 per annum thereafter Pros:   Hundreds of fonts already catalogued and available, convenient and easy-to-use. Cons:   Price per face high, currently CFN format fonts only Score: 70%

 
 
 

Can't find a suitable font to use in your masterpiece?

Mike Kerslake finds a possible solution...

I'll admit right now I'm an avid font collector, one of my first software purchases was Timeworks DTP followed by as many extra GDOS fonts as I could afford. When I moved over to Calamus I started over, collecting CFN fonts instead.

Collecting fonts is the easy bit, being able to find one when you it is a different matter. Printed reference pages provide quick and easy access to your hoard and, especially if you undertake commercial work, a resource clients can use to select fonts.

Matching a typeface supplied by a client can be frustrating and time-consuming. I'd always wondered if there was a better way and recently one such solution arrived on the Atari scene.

Dave Howell, of Walsall based Nexus Publishing, has recently launched a new combined font catalogue and font disk service, dedicated to taking the hassle out of font finding.

The Font House service involves buying a hefty ring-bound printed catalogue of all the fonts currently available from Nexus, along with the entire FaST Club's STC font collection. The catalogue costs £10.00, which includes one year's membership of the Font Club. Thereafter an annual fee of £10.00 is payable - effectively the catalogue is free!

Club members receive a monthly mailing of new catalogue pages - Nexus plan to release ten new faces every month. Each new face costs £1.00 each - the same price as the majority of the existing PD fonts in the catalogue.

A large proportion of the catalogue is devoted to CFN format display fonts but there are still plenty of font 'families' which offer italic, bold, light, condensed and other variations on the basic theme. Font 'families' vary in price depending on the number of faces on the disk.

The catalogue itself is neatly laid out in A5 size format with cross references to the alphabetically ordered faces, which makes finding your way around pretty painless. Each individual face has its own section including a full printout of all available characters - so you see exactly what you are buying before parting with your money.

Nexus points out many of the fonts, with the exception of the commercial STC ones, are shareware, and a further payment might have to be made to the font designer. Details accompany such fonts, where required.

Ultimately, the catalogue is part of a service, and only contains fonts available from Nexus. It does not pretend to be a complete catalogue of every CFN font obtainable and collectors will probably already have many of the fonts in their collection, quite possibly under different names.
However, existing collectors can still make good use of the catalogue as a reference guide. I have a vast collection of fonts, but despite playing with the various PD and shareware cataloguing programs, I've never found anything suitable - all too often they involve laborious loading and unloading of fonts, with one program insisting on a complete A4 sheet for each font! This printed catalogue provides a relatively cheap albeit partial solution to this problem.

Since the introduction of Speedo, TrueType and PostScript fonts on the Atari platform the use of CFN format fonts has declined so I was pleased to hear Nexus are making progress on a TrueType edition of the catalogue. A TrueType catalogue and font service would be a welcome cross-platform service and I look forward to developments on this front.

In conclusion, the catalogue and font service idea is a good one, although probably several years too late for many Atari users. If you have a small CFN collection and plan to expand it selectively, this is the place to start. If you already have a large CFN collection, you probably won't find many new fonts here but as a reference work it's still a lot less hassle than printing your catalogue.

I have one reservation. For the cost of each Font House face I could order a disk full of fonts from a PD/Shareware library. However, bearing in mind the time and effort required to put together such a well produced, easy-to-use catalogue and its secondary use as a guide to existing collections the Font House catalogue and service are both recommended.