Prevue fonts

[rudyvalencia]

Hey guys (and gals),

Now that I have a bit more time on my hands, I'm making a TrueType version of the H26f font and it'll be available within a couple weeks (once I get all the letters traced). It's a difficult process, and the spacing will not be a 100% exact match, but I'll make it as compatible as possible.

-- Rudy

[JSB1961]

Hello. This is Jeff Bruette. I've got good news and bad news. First, the good news is that you correctly identified me as the person that created the Prevue Channel fonts. The bad news is that I do not have the font file readily available. I have my old Amiga 3000T and I'm sure the font is on there. I just don't have an old-school monitor to hook to the machine.

As a side note, after the Prevue Channel, I went on to be the user interface designer for the DirecTV settop boxes at Hughes Network Systems (sister corporation to DirecTV at the time). A variant of the Prevue font was used on the HNS, Hitachi and Memorex brand DirecTV STB's.

Another name that you might care to know is David Berezowski. He was the lead programmer on the Prevue Channel software for many years. I designed the GUI and he did the coding.

Something you may have noticed on the Prevue font is that the letters have lots of fringe pixels. If you look at the characters enlarged you might wonder what those pixels are for because it makes the character look pretty crappy. However, on tradition TV's of the Prevue Channel era, the video signal was interlaced. These fringe pixels were added to the letter so they would actually create a single pixel flicker. That flicker was so fast that it made that frind pixel and the clear pixel immediately below it simply look like a halftone between the character color and the background color. The result was an anitaliased character that looked much smoother than it really was. This trick would probably not work on today's HDTVs. In a good quality TV you will see the charcter in all of its fringy glory.

I hope that my chiming in here has at least made for an interesting read.

[tin]

Hi Jeff

Hello to you and thanks for posting, it certainly did make for some interesting reading, in as much as fonts should be interesting of course

If you're interested in getting it back up and running, the 3000T plugs into a standard TV via the 15KHz video port - even modern LCD TVs can cope with the signal but it should also work on most modern monitors (that have a VGA port of course) via the 31KHz port. At least that's my experience here. And 3000Ts are hens-teeth rare I understand!

It would be interesting to know if David has been contacted by AriX who did the most of the detective work and bare-faced out-of-the-blue contacting over there in the states, I will IM him to see Would also be interesting to know if your Amiga's hard drive harbours anything more than the font

Thanks again for posting.

[LocalH]

Holy crap, how did I miss this for almost five years? LMAO

Jeff, if you're still at all interested in this, I'd love to dig into anything Prevue you might have on that A3KT

[tin]

I did DM Jeff a couple of times, but nothing forthcoming. Would love if that A3000 was resurrected, and there maybe was something interesting on there...

[LocalH]

Oh, and by the way, it's not really possible to properly preserve Prevue and PrevueC as TrueType fonts...they're both ColorFonts

Here is PrevueC 25, both pixel-exact and aspect-corrected versions. That first glyph is Ctrl-A on the Amiga, which I think is equivalent to ASCII 0x01?

Here is Prevue 13, both version as well. Possibly a bit of corruption or mis-rendering on the Family glyph. Palette is correct in terms of the font file itself, strangely enough (software probably overrides it).

I don't think this is displaying every glyph in the font though. Amiga ColorFonts are not really well supported anywhere but an Amiga lmao

[rudyvalencia]

I didn't know the font was encoded with outlining and shadows like that, for whatever reason I couldn't find that data in the font at all and assumed it was just being done in software.