1. Introduction

1.1 Terms of Distribution

HP48 Universal Font Library, distributed under the GPL (see file COPYING). Copyright (C) 1996, 1997 Andre Schoorl <aschoorl@engr.uvic.ca>

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

1.2 Scope

An increasing number of HP48 programs are being developed that have their own fonts rather than using the fonts built into the HP48. This is due to a number of reasons:

• Accessing the built-in fonts is slow.
• The built-in fonts do not support all the characters and cannot be modified.
• There is no way to distinguish between lower and upper case characters with the built-in small font.

A number of popular HP48 programs overcome these problems by providing their own copies of the fonts. Almost all of these are based on FNT1 and FNT2 from the Jazz library. Before the UFL, the authors of such programs were forced to either:

• Keep their own copy of one or more fonts in their program so that it would still run if the user does not have Jazz.
• Rely on the existence of Jazz in order for the program to run.

Both options are not ideal, because in the first case with just a few such programs the user ends up having multiple copies of the same font, which is a waste of room. The second case relies on the presence of Jazz, which most people don't have room for. The Universal Font Library (UFL) is a standard designed to alleviate both of the above problems.

The basic idea is to have a separate, standardized library containing FNT1 and/or FNT2. Various levels of the UFL are provided that contain the various font combinations, so users don't need to have fonts around that none of their programs require.

Also, the UFL allows for the separation of fonts and utilities to maintain them. We have developed a library for the UFL known as the Font Maintenance Library (FMnt) that can be downloaded separately from the UFL. It allows the user to check the status of their UFL library as well as recall and edit fonts. Once they are satisfied with their setup, they can purge the Font Maintenance Library to save room. Furthermore, the FMnt library is distributed with several alternate fonts.

The benefits to such a system are immediately evident. Most importantly, if the user has even more than one program using the same font, they start saving valuable room on their calculators. In addition, if the font in the UFL is edited, all of their favorite programs using the UFL immediately start using the updated font.

Furthermore, the UFL opens the doors for programmers who were previously unwilling to add an extra 1 or 2K to their library to use the fast FNT1 and/or FNT2 routines. With the UFL, they no longer need to worry about keeping their own copy of the font.