"LisaBBS" / Who knows Lisa font formats? from Tom Stepleton on 2015-07-17 (lisalist1)

From: Tom Stepleton <stepleton_at_email.domain.hidden>
Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2015 17:42:10 -0700 (PDT)

I wrote a program that lets you download files from the Workshop using your favorite terminal program and YMODEM. It's still pretty buggy, but you can check it out anyway (source only):

https://github.com/stepleton/lisabbs

I've only tried it on a Lisa 1 running Workshop 1.0. No idea what it does on other systems.

Anyway, I used this to download an interesting-looking file named "font.lib" (you can see it listed in the "screenshot"). I thought I'd try to see if I could visualize fonts inside the file, but I'm giving up now :-)

I'd still love to see the fonts, though.

I've been able to determine that font.lib is an archive (like ar or tar makes) containing a few dozen individual files with names like CENTURY24RPH.F, which certainly look like good names for font files. There seem to be several types of files, distinguished by the letter before the .F, which is either W (probably information about fonts for particular kinds of printers), H, S, or T (don't know about these). I don't have any good guesses for what W, H, S, and T could stand for, either.

My efforts to get anything that looks like letterforms out of these individual file records have all failed so far. With the exception of the W files, it seems the files may be lightly compressed somehow, but I'm not sure how.

Does anyone know more about these "files" or their format, or what kind of compression might have been used for important system resources like fonts? RLE is a candidate, but I'm not sure about that. Huffman coding might work, too...

More details when I have more time to write, --Tom

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Received on 2015-07-18 08:52:42