Installation is very easy. Insert the first disk (of four), follow directions from the standard Installer, and after a few minutes you're ready to play. Well, almost. I came upon one minor glitch. I tested FontMachine on an A2000, with OS 3.x; without a graphics card. According to the manual, I have more than enough basic resources. The resolution of your WorkBench screen doesn't matter, since FontMachine opens its own screen. In fact, it opens several screens; but, not for me - not yet, anyway. On startup, I got a error message telling me 'Risolution not supported' (that's charming Italio-English). Anyway, the program wouldn't start and I was desolate - insert melodramatic music here -. I immediately emailed the author, Michele, at ClassX. Here's the deal: I'm here in an NTSC country; but this program was developed in a PAL country (Hello to all my Italian friends!). Apparently, the program defaults to a PAL screenmode, and therefore looks for a PAL monitor the first time you start it. Even though they tried to emulate an NTSC system during development, they only had PAL hardware to test on. As instructed by ClassX, I went to my Storage/Monitors directory and double-clicked the PAL monitor icon. After that simple procedure, FontManager started right away. I was then able to go into the settings and choose an NTSC screenmode - now, I never have to think about it again. The problem was cleared up, and Michele and I got to exchange pasta sauce recipes (that's a little Italian joke, all Italians are born knowing how to make sauce. It's genetic).

I have a reputation for finding obscure bugs and software glitches. I seem to have a nose for it. There was nothing I could find in the manual that addressed NTSC, or PAL. There was info about OCS/ECS and AGA, since that dictates the total number of colors available for the font palette, and is central to using this program. In all fairness, I did get a very quick email response to my problem. I have suggested to ClassX that they include this info in the next revision of the manual. It would be nice if install programs were a little smarter: "Ah, I see you are using NTSC, let me start your PAL monitor driver for you!". An even better solution would be if all developers had a whole bunch of differently configured machines to work with through the process of development. Hello, Gateway? But, I digress. It wasn't a major trauma and I suspect those of you who keep all the different monitor files in your DEVS:Monitors/ directory won't encounter the problem.

ClassX also uses an interesting form of copy protection. Once you have installed the program, you have to get codes from the company before you have unobstructed use of it. You need a different code for each machine you install FontMachine on, which is not to say that you have to pay for it repeatedly; but, ClassX does keep track of the number of installations a customer has. So, if I eventually get my Future MegaAmiga, all I do is tell them and they will send me a number for THAT system. Well, it certainly is easy to do, and once it's done, it's invisible. I believe copy protection is important. I'm an artist and I get insane with the thoughts that someone could be stealing my work. I just hope nothing happens to ClassX. Maybe this is a new method of "developer protection". As soon as we hear there may be problems, we'll all be sending them cans of beans. Not a bad idea - looking out for each other, not the part about the beans - unless you love beans.

This deceptively small, but powerful program, lets you take an ordinary font and add a new paint-job on the old jalopy - so to speak. You can load any font, even a ColorFont, and enhance it. FontMachine allows control over a character's face, or "front", and its border. The cool thing about this idea is that you can map onto the front a still image, an animBrush, or what they call "plasma" and "pattern formulas" (a kind of loosely defined fractal noise). The outline can also get its own surfacing, using any of these methods, or you can decide not to add an outline. Then you can add basic attributes to the front face like: beveling, embossing, 3D, and shadow. The possibilities are endless. If you're a bit timid, just load up one of the included sample projects, there's almost 100 of them, to see how things can be done.

There's two tutorial scripts that you can start from the icon that's got the ARexx "crown" symbol on it. The manual warns that RexxMast must be running first, but I would think that most of us are booting with ARexx anyway - it's nice to be told though. These Tutorials are simple, and entertaining. You just sit back and watch. Even without them, the program is very easy to use. The tutorials and the manual make it clear that a lot of time and thought went into this program, and I appreciate that. It comes with a whole batch of palettes, brushes, fonts, projects, settings for math-created images, and ARexx scripts; certainly enough to play with.

If you don't have a graphics card, the "trick" is knowing how to make a good palette with 16 or 32 colors. So, everyone who graduated from DPaint school should do fine. If you're a little rusty, there's plenty of palettes included. The other "trick" is knowing which patterns and images will look good together, mixed between the front and outline; but, that's an artistic sense that no program or manual can give you. I'll just assume that you are all amazingly talented.

Having a graphics card should make life easy for you - ok, I admit it, I'm jealous. FontMachine should work with any graphics card that can use the CyberGraphX software, in which case you can design fonts with up to 256 colors.

Click image to see full size (640x402)

You are looking at two screens here. The Work screen has all the windows dealing with the palette, images and a preview of the font. The Editor or control panel is the second screen and can be dragged up and down. Some RTG software has difficulty with attached and draggable screens, which is why ClassX recommends CyberGraphX. You'll notice on the upper right of the screen there are two windows. These show the images that are placed on the front and border of the font. In the middle, is a window with a Preview of the font. You can resize and move all of these windows.

The real question is... Can I make cool looking fonts even with a lowly workhorse, like my A2000? I set out to do just that. The first time I tried to save a font, I got a "Not enough memory to save" error. This is where only having 1 MB of Chip RAM and no graphics card really limits you. So I made all my screens low-resolution to ease the burden on my poor Agnus. Another memory helper: the program gives you the option to save only parts of a font like caps, numbers, punctuation marks, international and special characters. Since it will take more memory to generate every aspect of a font, it's best to only save what you really need. Also, save the project so that when you DO get more memory and a graphics card you can rerender the font in all its glory - that's my plan.

For my first project, I just loaded up one of the plasma designs, loaded a palette I liked, made the front beveled, and I was happy. I only saved the caps because of my memory limitations. Once the font was saved from FontMachine, I started ImageFX, loaded a picture of apples I had, changed them a bit and loaded up my new font from the text requester. Except for a slight Feathering In, I didn't do anything to the font other than stamp it down. Now that I think of it, I could have taken the apple image, saved it as a CMAP image and mapped it onto the font face in FontMachine. Anyway, here's what I came up with, with almost no effort:

The next intriguing idea is making fonts that animate. Ah, ha! Fun time! It's as simple as starting an ARexx script that will generate the animation for you. First, I loaded one of the many included animation projects. Next, I start the script that will create the animation. Again, all scripts are started from the "crown" icon. After clicking on that, you'll see a list of all available scripts. If you select one and click on the Info gadget, it will tell you what that script does. Now, that's real friendly! There's two scripts that make animations. One makes Amiga ANIM format files, and the other makes GIF animations (for all you Web Meisters out there). Click OK and the script begins. I just started this now and it asked what text I wanted. After I typed in "FontMagic", away it went. It's rendering even as I write this. How much easier could it be?! Right out of the box, you can make great animated text for your website! Jees, Louise! Can this get any better? (And, by the way, since I'm obviously multitasking, it takes little memory to generate an anim in this way. For those of you who wish to write your own ARexx scripts, there's an extensive command set at your disposal.

Click image to see animation (250K)

If you look at the above animation, you'll notice that the text just appears from nowhere. You can also make text that has holes in it. Oooohhh. Just make an animbrush that uses color register 0 as the background. Remember those old DPaint days. They're Baaack... I also noticed a number of animations obviously generated in ImageFX - can you say, Hockney Tiles? Not to mention some images that looked suspiciously similar to Imagine fractal textures. Seriously, this kind of cleverness is what made me fall in love with my Amiga in the first place. Suddenly, I know what I'm going to do with all those stupid little pictures I've been saving for years. Every time I see some interesting texture I compulsively put it on a JAZ disk - "I'll do something with that eventually". Here's another animation that took very little effort to make:

Click image to see animation (269K)

Look closely and you'll see two fade-ins. The border comes in first and cycles, then the face dissolves in. The frame counts are different for each animation. There really is a lot going on here. Keep in mind, that I'm just using the scripts that came with the program. So, those of you who might be a little timid, can still get great use from FontMachine. Very nice. But there's MORE!!

You can also click in the image windows and move the images around until you get the font face or outline exactly where you want it. This process is interactive. I didn't believe it when I read this in the manual - you'll really only understand it when you do it, but this is cool! This is just one of many little details that make FontMachine a very professional package. I haven't even touched on all the things that FontMachine can do - the more you use it the more you start to realize the potential.

FontMachine will work with any Amiga with at least 2MB of RAM, a HardDisk, and OS2.0 or greater. As always, owners of an accelerator and/or graphics card will appreciate increased productivity.

CyberGraphX 8-bit screens are supported, which allows the creation of 256 color fonts; but, there's a couple things you need to know. As cecilia mentioned, FontMachine uses two screens, one for the font controls, and one for palette selection and preview display. This is done to make sure that when using 16 or 32 color displays, that your palette isn't limited because of colors needed for the user interface.

These are draggable screens, one of which is lowered so that you can see both at once (as shown in the screen snapshot above). In order for this to work properly with CyberGraphX though, you need to have CyberGraphX's DRAGGING option enabled. This is the first annoyance that I have with this program. On my CyberGraphX system, I have disabled DRAGGING, which makes screen switching faster, so this was a problem. With DRAGGING disabled, the program will still work, but you won't be able to see both screens at once. Instead, you can press the right mouse button to toggle between the two screens. Trust me, you will find this very annoying. The alternative is to enable DRAGGING, but this requires you to reboot your system - and then of course, after you're done, you'll have to reboot again. With a 256 color screen, it should be easy enough for all the windows and controls to be put on the one screen. This would solve the problem. Hopefully, ClassX will look at this for a future version. If you use the DRAGGING support of CyberGraphX, this won't be a concern for you.

I was a bit concerned about the copy protection scheme used with this program; so, I contacted ClassX to discuss the matter. It's important to understand how this copy protection works. When started for the first time, the program looks for particular information about your System hard drive and then gives you a special code. At this point, you can still use the program, but all fonts that you create will have "FontMachine by ClassX..." written over them (ClassX calls this "casual pollution"). To get rid of the "pollution", you have to contact ClassX, or one of several distributors, and tell them your code. They will then give you special codes to enter into the program which will disable the "pollution". ClassX respond very quickly to their email, so generally you won't have a long wait. But, if for some reason there is a longer delay, it's good to know that you can use the program without worry that you are wasting your time. Saved projects are not affected by this "pollution", so once you receive your codes, all you have to do is load your projects and re-generate the fonts. If you buy software directly from ClassX, and have previously registered one of their programs, the needed installation codes will come with the product you are buying from them.

Although I don't necessarily like programs to have restrictive copy protections, it is a fact that there is a great deal of software piracy. In many cases, it is piracy that has caused many developers to stop making software for the Amiga. Piracy exists outside the Amiga community; but, because there aren't a lot of Amigas (in the big scheme of things) it has an even greater impact on this platform. Something has to be done about it, and many developers have tried to come up with some method of protection against this kind of theft.

I must admit that ClassX was very smart about the way they implemented their copy protection. They made the extra effort to come up with a good way of implementing it, that wouldn't be too restrictive to the user; yet, still remain as effective as possible. As it is, you can install the program on any hard drive (or partition). At any time, you can move the installed program to another hard drive, re-install it, or even have it installed on several hard drives at once - without worrying about the protection. It only becomes a temporary annoyance if you change your System hard drive (need something bigger?) or try to install the software on a different computer; in which case you just let ClassX know about it. As well, ClassX will allow you install the program on several of your own machines; again, it's just a matter of asking.

The obvious concern is if ClassX were to cease to exist. No need to worry though, ClassX assured me that if something like that were to happen, they would release a keycode generator to the public (Aminet).

I have one more annoyance with the program... When you start it, it opens a requester to tell you what it's doing while it's starting. That's fine. But after it's done that, it displays a FontMachine graphic and just sits there for almost 10 seconds. As best as I was able to determine, FontMachine isn't doing anything during this wait. If you are as busy as me, things like that probably annoy you, too.

Still, FontMachine is very very cool! You can create some very interesting looking fonts, and the combinations are endless. If you are bored with fonts, this is the program for you!