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FontMonger

FontMonger is a new product in the Macintosh market from a new company, Ares. Like Altsys, though, they’re no strangers to the Macintosh market – they’re the people responsible for Letraset’s FontStudio, Fontographer’s main competitor. FontMonger, like Metamorphosis Professional, is a font conversion utility, but FontMonger goes further, allowing you to customize your fonts to some degree. FontMonger currently supports conversion between TrueType, Type 1, and Type 3 fonts. Sorry, no NeXT or PC formats yet. (Steve and Bill already have plenty of money and don’t need help getting more.) FontMonger also lets you convert to PICT outlines or EPSF files. The biggest difference between FontMonger and Metamorphosis Professional, though, is its font customizing ability. Although FontMonger doesn’t allow editing of the actual outlines of a font, it allows you an array of other functions such as the ability to copy characters between fonts, perform various transformations to any or all characters of a font, and create a variety of composite characters such as fractions and accented characters. Suppose you’ve always wanted to create a narrow version of Times. Simple, with FontMonger. Open up Times, select all the characters, open up the Alter Characters window, and type 80% in the width box. Save the new font as Times Narrow. FontMonger will also save the previous original characters in the PostScript font so you can modify it further in the future, or, if you wish to save on disk space, compress the font and it’ll remove the extra information. Similarly, you can expand characters horizontally, modify character widths, or add a slant for obliqued fonts. Creating fractions is equally easy.

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