Propeller Font
Title:Propeller Font
Author:121.127.194.37
Published:Mon, 06 Sep 2010 11:24:42 GMT

The PropellerTool includes a built in Parallax font that is used to display the special drawing characters, and corresponds to the internal font table in the Propeller ROM. When PropellerTool is started, it will install the font Parallax.ttf on startup.

It seems the current version (0.700) of this font is very sensitive to resolution variations. Often can be seen as bad kerning, in particular on linux all the characters often get totally corrupted both under wine and in native applications. This can be seen by changing point sizes and italic/bold modes.

The easiest fix is to download the a tweaked font file from http://forums.parallax.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=53903&d=1212437073, and replace the existing font.

Linux

In linux you replace the font in two places, wine and Xwindows.
Wine will keep it in ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/
Gnome/Xwindows location used to be able to use the Gnome file manager to access 'fonts:///', but that no longer works for me (Ubuntu 8.1).

What worked for me was:
cd /tmp
wget --content-disposition http://forums.parallax.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=53903&d=1212437073
sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype/myfonts/
cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype/myfonts/
sudo unzip /tmp/Parallax.ttf.zip
sudo fc-cache -f -v .

Windows


Open the control panel and delete the existing font, and drag in the new version.

From Scratch

The fixed font has all the bitmapped fonts stripped from the Parallax.ttf font file. The resulting vector font then seems to work fine.

The instructions are:
  1. copy/backup the original Parallax.ttf file that get puts in the windows font directory.
  2. open the Parallax.ttf file with fontforge.
  3. When prompted import none of the bitmap fonts.
  4. Select Element->Font Info
  5. Update the version name and comments. (ONLY!)
  6. Choose File->Generate Fonts
  7. Overwrite your Parallax.ttf

Note that it seems the font name is embedded in the TTF file, so you cannot simply create a new file name and then be able to use both the old and new font. If you want to do that, go back and edit the font name fields in the Font Info and generate to a new file name.


Mac OSX


On Mac OSX the application FontBook can be used to install fonts for the different users. From the menu File->Add Font select the directory containing the Parallax.ttf (or any font file for that matter) and press the OK button. The file will be installed into ~/Library/Fonts, i.e. the fonts directory for your user. You can also move it there manually. If you do not want the font anymore, just move the file to the trash. (The font Monaco works very well in BST too). A font point of 16 with anti-alias (select it from BST editor preferences pane) works very well.


Discussion posted on http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?t=98307 and a copy of the modified font file http://forums.parallax.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=53903&d=1212437073