Town Compass Data Viewer Fonts

[Bobny]

I use Town Compass' Data Viewer for viewing the World Almanac 2005 and the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia. The font that comes with the Data Viewer leaves much to be desired - it's faint and hard to read. There is an option in the Data Viewer to use Palm fonts that come with the OS but that font does not have italics and so I get a bunch of squares whenever italics are to be displayed by the viewer when I use the Palm fonts.

My question is: Does anyone know how to add an italic font to the Palm fonts used by the Data Viewer from Town Compass?

I haven't seen this answered anywhere on the web so I thought I'd come to the experts.

Regards, Bob

[Ken in Regina]

Doesn't Birdwatch, or one of those, use a font utility to provide its fonts? Would it be possible to use one of those fonts?

[jonasolof]

qBuddy gives a (too) large suppply of fonts.

[Curious Cat]

Do you have the latest version? These are the 2 latest updates:

DataViewer Updates
2.87 Fixed italic extended font bug

2.86 Added extended font character support
........

[robertp366]

I think its a seperate utility - "Font Bucket" that Birdwatch uses to import and manage all the fonts on the Que. This should allow you to add another font or three. BW download comes with this I think too, along with a few extra fonts. JM added this in order to use the very large fonts for the speedometer - I have a 100 point Arial font for the speedo in use.

Here's the url for the FREE Font Bucket; enjoy:

http://www.handshigh.com/fontbucket/

R

[apersson850]

Yes, that's correct, regarding the use of FontBucket for Birdwatch.

[Bobny]

I got this reply from Town Compass on their Data Viewer which means I can't have both italics and a normal font at the same time. I didn't realize the Palm implementation of fonts was so limited:

"Bob,



No, it’s a quirk of the Palm OS on the device. Font hackers replace the system font with their own font styles, but they still have to correspond to the same number of characters as the system font. The system font only allows for a certain number of characters, of which there are only normal, large, and bold fonts (bold is not normal font that looks bolded, it is a different set of characters). Palm left out italics entirely from their system font, and no font hack can “add” characters to the system font number, which they would need to do in order to have italics.

Our font is hard-coded into DataViewer. I won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say that creating fonts for Palm OS devices is much more complicated than it appears to be to the average user. We know that you think you could just plug in a font and make it look however you want, but that’s not the way it works on Palm OS devices. You could use any font you wanted if you owned a Pocket PC device, though, because we use straight TrueType files (most fonts on PC computers are TrueType) in DataViewer. You can’t do that on the Palm OS.

Thol Fielder
Product Support
Town Compass, LLC"

[Curious Cat]

Translation: You are S.O.L.