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	Archive through August 18, 2025	19		08/19 02:12pm

When I make it to the office at 1300, delayed by health issues, I will send if I remember. For the biggest chance that I remember, email me before that time.

I think I said before, I recently suffer from “iron poor blood” which from day to day leaves me groggy, weak, and/or dizzy. The meds aren’t working and in a few weeks they will pump the rusty water from a coffee can of old nails left out in the rain into my veins, supposedly fixing things. I am in the fifth consecutive really bad day. I haven’t had this many really bad days in a row since this started in June.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, August 25, 2025 - 04:08 pm: Edit

Shawn Hantke wins a commendation medal for getting the font suitcases working (SSD 10, SSD 12, SILICON BEACH 12, SILICON BEACH 24, BOX 10). Anyone who wants these is welcome to them. Shawn, send them to Albert, and everyone can ask Albert for them until we get them into the download section.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Tuesday, August 26, 2025 - 11:30 am: Edit

The Font suitcases were sent to Al. They are in Stuffit Archive files (.sit) sent to me by SVC, all I did was unstuff them, and then copy them to my mac hd-system-fonts folder and restart the computer to install them. To clarify "I got them working" they are working for me on a Power Mac G3 running Mac OS 9.2.2. I have tried to convert them with Fontographer 4 for Classic Mac, and the current version of FontForge for Windows 11 and haven't had any success so far to turn them into a Font File Type that will work on newer Macs or PCs yet.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, August 26, 2025 - 03:47 pm: Edit

Anyone who can convert the Mac font suitcases to something a PC can read, ask Albert for the files.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Thursday, September 25, 2025 - 04:20 pm: Edit

I upgraded my Power Mac G3 with a Power Mac G4 found locally. It is a Mirrored Door Drive Model with dual 867MHZ processors and the max 1.5G of RAM. I bought a pair of Solid-State Drive Kits from Other World Computing, so it now has two 120GB SSDs instead of Hard Drives. I believe I now have all of the old applications needed for publishing and I also bought a bunch of old reference books. Online information on the late 90s and early 2000s applications is pretty sparse and since I don’t have much Macintosh experience, there has been a learning curve.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Thursday, September 25, 2025 - 04:20 pm: Edit

SVC Do you remember what application you used to create the BOX and SSD fonts? Due to the quirks of Mac OS 9 I am still not even sure what kind of font files they are. They work just fine on my Mac OS 9 in Excell, Word, DeskPaint & DeskDraw, Freehand 8, etc. I have tried on Mac OS 9 to open them with Fontographer 4, Font Studio 2, and Font Monger 1.5 with no luck. I have also had no luck using FontForge or FontLab for windows 11 PC. FontForge did open Silcon Beach and supposedly created a TTF font that should work on PC. I made Word 2001 docs and Acrobat 5 pdfs of the BOX, SSD and Silicon Beach Fonts. Not sure how helpful they will be, but I’ll send them to Al.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, September 25, 2025 - 09:31 pm: Edit

That was way too many years ago.

By Mike West (Mjwest) on Monday, September 29, 2025 - 05:44 pm: Edit

If someone has an actual font builder, I or recreated bitmaps for all of the fonts used on SSDs. So, if we can't translate them, you might be able to rebuild them.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Monday, September 29, 2025 - 06:16 pm: Edit

Mike, if you could email me the bitmaps. I can plug them into fontforge and see if it will create a pc font from that.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Tuesday, October 07, 2025 - 05:03 pm: Edit

Creators, what dpi are you making your SSDs at? Do you think 300dpi is enough for good resolution and print quality?

By Robert Russell Lender (Rusman) on Wednesday, October 08, 2025 - 12:30 am: Edit

I'm not sure how to know what DPI I've used to create SSDs.

But I try my best for ones I've made for in house play to be the same number of pixels per square inch as this...
https://www.starfleetgames.com/sfb/playtest/R9_9_Hydran_F-LP.gif

I have found that unless I stick to the above, the same look and feel when printing them out tends to falter a bit.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Wednesday, October 08, 2025 - 01:25 am: Edit

RRL: That's a good one. Do we have listening post ships in the game?

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Wednesday, October 08, 2025 - 09:35 am: Edit

That image (playtest Hydran F-LP gif) and the R1.09 FT tiff, and the R1.89 Fed SF Tables tiff images that Al sent me are 144dpi. MS paint or MS Office Picture Viewer properties on Windows will show you the size of an image in pixels or images. Then you divide the pixel number by the inches number to get the dots per inch resolution. On Mac OS 9 the DeskPaint and Adobe Acrobat 5 the default dpi is 144 but it can be set to 300, 600, or 1200. In my opinion, I think 300 looks best, but I could be talked into 144 if that is the consensus. 600 and 1200 are ridiculously high resolution for essentially black and white line drawings. I was using 1200dpi for the tiffs I colored in the past as that was the only setting that worked with "oppsoft pdf to tiff converter" which I was using. It had output settings for 144, 300 and 600 but it turned the SSDs images from the pdfs into a garbled mess. I have no idea why 1200 was the only setting that worked with that software.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Thursday, October 09, 2025 - 10:10 pm: Edit

I stand corrected, Al says the Hydran playtest gif is 72 dpi and the other two original SSD TIFFs he sent me are 72 dpi. I guess 72 dpi is the standard. I can only blame myself for the error, or maybe a windows to mac error. Stupid windows.

By Ken Kazinski (Kjkazinski) on Saturday, October 11, 2025 - 09:04 am: Edit

(R1.923) is found on the ADB Web site. There is a PDF with the rule modified on 5 March 2001.

(R1.923) MOBILE LISTENING POST FREIGHTER (F-LP): Operated by nearly all races ...

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Saturday, October 11, 2025 - 10:11 am: Edit

Shawn, the way we do those we never see a dpi number. Whatever you found just happened, not planned.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Saturday, October 11, 2025 - 12:25 pm: Edit

Okay. Thanks, SVC and Ken.

By Russ Simkins (Madcowak) on Thursday, November 20, 2025 - 10:53 pm: Edit

Anyone get anywhere on the fonts for Windows?

From Shawn's posts it sounds like they are SFNT raster only fonts. Mac and Linux (X11) support raster only but Windows does not. They would have to be rebuilt with vector graphics and assembled. I am patiently waiting for Al to respond to my request for the fonts. Went ahead and played with rebuilding the "SSD 10" font just to see what issues might be involved. I only have a limited character set from a couple of published SSDs (capital letters, numbers, and the odd punctuation).

example
Black is sample image from ADB and red is a hastily created OpenType Windows compatible font. It can be done! Just need the rest of the character set (and all the other fonts) so I don't have to go through every SSD looking for previously unused character examples.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Friday, November 21, 2025 - 07:35 am: Edit

Russ, I sent you the Font suitcases that were sent to me.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, November 21, 2025 - 08:21 am: Edit

Tell me the font you want and the size you need and I will create an example for you.

By Russ Simkins (Madcowak) on Friday, November 21, 2025 - 03:45 pm: Edit

SVC, let me work with Shawn for now and see if I can recover the original character sets. Better use of your time elsewhere.
Do have one question. OpenType Fonts have an embedded copyright. How would you like these to read?

Copyright (c) 2025, ADB Inc.

or something else?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, November 21, 2025 - 07:29 pm: Edit

Fine by me.