[Atropos]

I'm running OS 9 on a B&W G3 with scads of memory, ATM 4.5.2 and Font Smoothing turned on with the shareware Control Panel "Smoothtype".

I've had this problem off and on for some time, back at least until OS 8.5, but it's really getting irritating.

The problem is that certain characters in certain fonts (TrueType only as far as I know but I am not certain) simply won't show up at some point sizes. For example, the "ae" ligature in Arial and the "->" character in Symbol won't appear -- at some, but not all, sizes. If, by example, I am in Word with a document at 200% view (I run at 1600x1200 resolution), the characters won't appear. If I drop down to 100% view they are fine.

ATM's running with a 2MB font cache. I have 256 MB of physical RAM and never run out. With the exception of Apple's base TrueType fonts (and the ones Outlook Express 5 *refuses* to work with if they aren't in the System Folder) all of my fonts are outside the System Folder and are being managed by ATM.

Anyone have any ideas?

I did notice last night that some of my spacing is getting screwed up on Postscript fonts, now that I've accepted Apple's latest OpenGL drivers... but the font issue I raised above existed long before that update was installed.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

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David B. O'Donnell -
Atropos@fates.or

I have the same problem in MS Office when displaying documents at diffrent scale levels but the documents print properly. I have no third party font software other than ATM. If it prints OK and doesn't happen with other software like Photoshop you have the same problem. I have not seen MS Office display fonts properly at high resolutions on any Mac when the document scale is changed.

[Millennium]

I think the problem is with SmoothType. I've always had trouble viewing underscores with ST. I've never had problems with the other characters, but if this is only happening with TrueType fonts (and ATM handles PostScript fonts) then that's where I'd start looking.

Can you view the characters if you turn off Font Smoothing in the ST control panel?

[Don Foy]

Has anyone checked with Greg Landweber, who wrote SmoothType, along with Kaleidoscope and other cool programs?

He is really fast to respond to problems with his software, if it really is a problem with his software.

[Atropos]

Thanks for the suggestions! Turning SmoothType off fixed the problem as far as I can see -- I'm able to view the missing characters perfectly now.

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David B. O'Donnell -
Atropos@fates.or