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by WillAdams 235 days ago
Yeah, it kind of kills me that I am writing this on a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 running Windows 11 so that I can run Macromedia Freehand/MX (I was a beta-tester for that version) so that I can still access Altsys Virtuoso 2 files from my NeXT Cube (Virtuoso 2 ~= Macromedia Freehand 4) for a typeface design project I'm still working on (a digital revival of a hot metal typeface created by my favourite type designer/illustrator who passed in 1991, but whose widow was gracious enough to give me permission to revive).

I was _so_ hopeful when I asked the devs to revive the Nx-UI code so that FH/MX could have been a native "Cocoa" app....
1 comments
latexr 235 days ago
> running Windows 11 so that I can run Macromedia Freehand/MX

Freehand still works on Windows 11? I’m happy for you, I never found a true replacement for it.

> a digital revival of a hot metal typeface created by my favourite type designer/illustrator who passed in 1991, but whose widow was gracious enough to give me permission to revive

Any reason you haven’t shared the name of the designer or the typeface? That story sounds interesting, I’d really welcome learning more.

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WillAdams 235 days ago
Yes, fortunately. I despair of what I'm going to do when I no longer have such an option. Cenon is clunky, Inkscape's cross-platform nature keeps it from having many interface aspects which I depend on, and I'd rather give up digital drawing than use Adobe Illustrator (which despite using since v3.2 on college lab Macs and on my NeXT Cube I never found comfortable).

The designer/typeface are Warren Chappell's Trajanus, and his unreleased Eichenauer --- I read _The Living Alphabet_ (and his cousin Oscar Ogg's _The 26 Letters_) when I was very young, and met him briefly on a school field trip back when he was Artist-in-Residence at UVA and did a fair bit of research in their Rare Book Room, and even had a sample of the metal type (missing one character unfortunately).

It is currently stalled at my having scanned and drawn up one of each letter at each size which I have available, but only having two letters, _N_ and _n_ in all sizes --- probably shouldn't worry that much about the optical axis, since it was cut in metal in one master size and the other sizes made using a pantograph, but there were _some_ adjustments which I'd like to preserve. There is a digital version of Trajanus available, but it's based on the phototype. I've been working at recreating each character using METAFONT, encompassing the optical size variation in that programmatically, but it's been slow going (and once I'm done, I then have to work out how to make it into outlines....)

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