Font Silo™
Font Silo™gives you the ability to install your own fonts
and to choose which fonts to use on an individual document basis.
You can optionally choose not to install Font Silo™
to save a little bit of memory.
Font Silo™ supports only single-byte text encodings such as
the windows-1252 Western European text encoding. If a document is
specified to have any other encoding such as any of the Chinese,
Japanese, or Korean text encodings, then the document displays
with the device font even if you
select installed fonts
for the document.
In the case where a document does not specify its encoding,
iSilo™ assumes the windows-1252 encoding unless you
specifically select the document's encoding using the
display options
dialog. So in the case where iSilo™ does not know a
document's encoding and you do not manually specify the encoding,
iSilo™ assumes the windows-1252 encoding and thus enables
the use of Font Silo™ for the document. This would be
undesirable behavior if the document's actual encoding is not
windows-1252. For example, a document does not specify its
encoding, you know that it is encoded using the Shift-JIS Japanese
encoding, and your device supports the display of Shift-JIS encoded
Japanese text. So unless you manually select the document's encoding
to be Shift-JIS using the
display options
dialog, the Japanese text does not display correctly.
Font Silo™ supports the use of the following font formats:
A Font Silo™ font set is a collection of bitmapped fonts
of one typeface. The set can have any combination of font sizes
from 5 to 99 points and for each size, can have multiple styles
from plain, bold, italic, and bold italic. You can have as
many Font Silo™ font sets installed as the memory of your
device allows. These features were designed specifically
to support the document display capabilities of iSilo™.
Using "iSiloX for Windows", you can generate a Font Silo™
font set based on any Windows® installed font and scaled to any
resolution from 50 to 300 DPI.
This font format was developed by Hands High Software
<http://www.handshigh.com/>. You do not need to install
the FontBucket™ program to use FontBucket™ fonts with
Font Silo™.
A FontBucket™ font database can contain a collection
of bitmapped fonts just as a Font Silo™ database can.
However, there is no enforced method of specifying point sizes
and styles. A single FontBucket™ font database can contain
fonts of multiple typefaces.
FontHack fonts were the first user-installable fonts developed for the
Palm OS®. You do not need to install either a FontHack
program nor a hack installation such as HackMaster to use FontHack
fonts with Font Silo™.
A FontHack font database usually contains only one font, but in
some cases may contain two or more fonts. When choosing
a FontHack font for display, all text displays in the same size.
In documents in iSilo™ format, individual runs of text
can have different point sizes and styles.
In the case of Font Silo™ fonts and FontBucket™ fonts,
the Font Silo™ rendering engine attempts to find the
best size match among the available sizes in the font to use.
If the font to use is a FontHack font, then since a FontHack
font consists of only one size, only that one size can be used.
In the case of the text style, if the text to be displayed is in
bold or italics and no version of the font matches the requested style,
Font Silo™ synthesizes the corresponding effect (i.e., bold,
italics, or both).
In the Font Silo Font Manager dialog and in the Font Options dialog,
the list of fonts uses the following naming conventions for each
supported font format:
- Font Silo™ fonts: The name of a font is the same
as the font's database name.
- FontBucket™ fonts: The name of a font starts with
the prefix "{fb}", followed by the font name, then the name of the
font database containing the font.
- FontHack fonts: The name of a font starts with
the prefix "{fh}" and is then followed by the name of the font's
database name.
These conventions allow you to easiliy determine the format of the
fonts you have installed on your device.
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