ChiWriter 3.17 and Modern HP LaserJet Printers: ‘Dark Courier’ and Other Problems
If like me you have a large amount of material in ChiWriter 3.17 form, with HP Courier as your default STANDARD (F1) font, and your trusty DeskJet gives up the ghost on you, you will have noticed to your distress that you can no longer obtain a Dark Courier which will look half-decent with your downloaded ITALIC, GREEK, HEBREW, etc. What is now in-built in modern LaserJets is a spindly and unappealing substitute. Unfortunately this turns up as FOREIGN & UNDERLIN as well. Nothing looks as it did. In my case I could no longer replicate my Oxford dissertation for scholars. HP have received many complaints about their new Courier; in response they have made available a bitmapped ‘Dark Courier’ soft font, in two sizes and three character sets including Roman-8. This may be obtained from them by mail for the cost of shipping: the part no. is LJ690EN3.
I have taken their 12-point Plain Courier, converted it with the familiar ChiWriter utilities into a CW font, made Laser and Printer fonts ISTANDAR.LFT/HP out of that, and rewritten the original printer driver file so that my downloadable font is now the default STANDARD (and FOREIGN & UNDERLIN) font. This, like my other Laser and Printer alphanumeric fonts, has had Extended Characters added in, so that, for instance, a Bibliography can be set up replete with French and German titles in Bold and Italics, with headings in ORATOR.
There was no need to touch their ITALIC and BOLD Courier, for they are identical to the existing CW fonts. It would be possible to do the same job on their 10-point Plain, Italic and Bold, but I have not felt the need for that. One day, if I had the need, I might work on those fonts too, so as to supply myself and others with a complete set of small Courier fonts sized for footnotes/endnotes.
While I was about it, I refined several Courier printer fonts in more than one way. The new ‘Dark’ Plain Courier, like the old, has ugly spermatozoon-shaped commas and apostrophes. (The semi-colon is similarly afflicted. I have sometimes, to make the text look better, used Search and Replace to invoke the nice-looking Greek forms instead.) It has, like all the alphanumeric fonts, no ‘Smart’ quotes, single or double. The Double Quotes in SYMBOL are useful, but not versatile enough. I have therefore borrowed freely, and changed the shapes for the better. With my adapted Laser *.HP files, you may obtain nice shapes all round, with left-handed and right-handed single and double quotation marks. This addition of ‘Smart Quotes’ applies to Elite and Proportional as well. Left-handed marks are on "`" and "~" respectively. If you ever need "~" in its own right, use SYMBOL. You may substitute my forms for all your old ones throughout your documents, without the layout being affected one pixel.
The Screen fonts in the Chiwrite main directory have been altered correspondingly for WYSIWYG.
DOWNLOADS are here:
(a) Screen Fonts *.SFT plus Printer-driver
(b) Printer Fonts *.HP
(c) Laser Fonts *.LFT
It may be that you have found yourself unable to print your ChiWriter files at all with a LaserJet. Can you now download and print out quite straightforwardly using my new setup? No, because your LaserJet is not geared to printing in DOS. Left to itself it will continue to use its internal fonts by default. You need to download the HP LaserJet Remote Control Panel Utility. (http://www.hp.com/country/ca/eng/support.htm) After downloading your special fonts to the printer, run this utility: within it you will choose the ‘soft’ fonts to print with. You may print out a test page with your soft fonts as a check. Your ChiWriter printing out of DOS will then be perfect until you turn off the printer. If you should need to print out of Windows with the soft fonts still in the printer, you may come out of DOS to do that, and return: it will all still work.
N.B. You may wish to back up your old directories before you overwrite with my files, in case you want one day to restore the status quo ante without reinstalling programme or original Laser printer files.
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