Gary Graham has painstakingly created a new OpenType Font Collection for Apple II fans – Apple II Pro. The package includes eight typefaces: Apple II Pro, Display Pro, ALT Pro, Display ALT Pro, and their inverted “Neg” counterparts. Additionally, Gary has crafted an impressive guide that details every aspect of these fonts.
According to his documentation, “Apple II Pro is a vastly expanded version of the original Apple IIc and Apple IIe internal character sets, including MouseText, all combined into one font which is also WGL4 compliant.” Inspired to improve on the Print Char 21 font, besides the benefits of OpenType, Gary’s fonts have proper mapping, so changing between another font and Apple II Pro will not cause the selected characters to disappear as sometimes happened.
In Gary’s words, “The best way to describe my version of this font is to simply say, if you need to use an Apple II font in the creation of documents and know what OpenType features are, these fonts will make the journey a lot smoother. The other thing that drove me nuts, was the lack of being able to type something with Print Char 21 and having no easy way to change the characters from the regular look to bold or italic characters that are present in the font. With my fonts, you can select a letter, a sentence, a paragraph, a page, and with one click it can become bold or italic, which is why OpenType was invented in the first place – to make things work smoother.”
The Negative or (Inverse) character set contains the most popular used characters. For a complete Inverse Character Set, “Apple II NEG Pro” is available for use:
“Apple II Display Pro” and an inverted “NEG” version are included:
“Apple II Alt Pro” is an alternate version of Apple II Pro with a reduced character set featuring the upper and lowercase alphabet having a more serif look, plus a different numeric set:
The Negative or (Inverse) character set contains the most popular used characters covering the Code Page 1251 Latin 1. For a complete Inverse Character Set, “Apple II Alt NEG Pro” is available for use:
And finally “Apple II Display ALT Pro” with a “NEG” counterpart:
The “Apple II Pro – OpenType Font Collection” version 1.03 and printed documentation are available exclusively from Call-A.P.P.L.E.. Thanks Gary for creating these fonts and giving everyone a better tool to use!
