Battle of the Font Converters Article by Ken Hancock, (c) 1991 Ken Hancock Tests by Ken Hancock and Dave Platt Metamorphosis Professional 2.0 Altsys Corporation 269 W

Metamorphosis was the premiere font conversion utility for the Macintosh and has only gotten better now that it has metamorphosed into Metamorphosis Professional

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

So, now the question comes down to who does a better job of font conversion. We ran two tests, a Type 1 to TrueType conversion and a Type 3 to Type 1 conversion

For the first test, we each converted the New Century Schoolbook Roman Type 1 font with both Metamorphosis Professional and FontMonger. Dave had the following comments on his results. "The real difference between the FontMonger outlines and the Metamorphosis Professional outlines shows up at small point sizes such as 4 to 8 points at 300 dpi on a DeskJet

Since I also purchased FontMonger while I was in the process of converting Type 1 to TrueType, I went ahead and performed a second test. For this test, I first converted the Type 1 font to a Type 3 font, thereby stripping it of the hinting that was initially part of the font

As part of some design work I was doing, I converted a few Type 1 fonts to outlines and compared the results. Metamorphosis Professional and FontMonger take very different approaches here

I knew if I didn't include a section on speed, someone would surely send in a note to MailBITS telling me that I forgot something (not that it will stop you - thanks for keeping me honest), so here it is

In the first test, Dave liked FontMonger's conversion best, I liked Metamorphosis Professional's best. Dave's DeskJet tends to have larger dots than my PLP, so the larger dots may partially make up for the thinner strokes