Running
the GXWaterfall tests
GXWaterfall incorporates testing routines that allow the
user to test the appearance of a font in relation to how it appears onscreen,
in hardcopy form, in a block of text and how one font compares to another.The
four tests are as follows...
The GXWaterfall
test
The Waterfall test, after which the application is named,
allows the user to select a line of text from a Waterfall document window
and cascade that text down the document in different font sizes. The user
then has the option of printing the cascaded text for comparison with the
onscreen version. Any major differences between the two will be noticed
by the user who can then act to fix those differences. The Waterfall test
also allows the user to compare the relative appearance of the same font
in different font sizes i.e. readability of large fonts.
To run the Waterfall test select some text to be cascaded,
see GXWaterfall Editing Features
on how to do this, then go to the Test menu and select the Waterfall option.
This will bring up a dialog box like the one below .
Choosing Clear from the dialog box will clear the current
document of all previous test results so make sure you save any necessary
work before this option is clicked on or else choose the Don't Clear option.Clicking
on the Cancel button will abandon the test and return you to the current
document.If either the Clear or Don't Clear buttons are clicked then the
Waterfall test will run with the effect of cascading the selected text in
a variety of font sizes on the users screen.See Example
Test Cases for an example of the results produced by the Waterfall test.
TIP: Selecting a range of glyphs from a line of text and
then selecting Waterfall is a fast way to achieve a waterfall output.
The start and end font sizes of a waterfall test can be
set by going to the Configuration menu option and choosing Waterfall Sizes.This
will bring up a dialog box like the following,
The Start font size allows you to choose an initial font
size from which to start cascading text.The End font size option lets you
set the font size at which the Waterfall test will stop.The Increment/Step
option allows you to choose intervals of font sizes to step over, so going
from a start font size of 20 point to an end font size of 40 point with
a step size of 5 will produce a 5 line listing like the one below.
The Text test
This is an additional test which can be performed using
GXWaterfall. Selecting the Text Test option from the Test menu results in
a quantity of text output to the current Waterfall window in the current
font and size 3 paragraphs will be output containing the same text:
- Lower Case - only lower case letters
- Middle Case - words begin with capitals and remaining
letters are lower.
- Upper Case - only upper case (capital) letters used
A word wrapping feature has been implemented to prevent
'half words' on lines. This test is to see how a font looks in a text context.See
Example Test Cases to see
how this should look.
The
Compare Fonts(QD) test
This test allows you to compare the horizontal metrics
of any two fonts.If a font is being designed for use in dialog boxes then
it can be compared with the Chicago font to ensure the dialog box text does
not overflow when the font is not Chicago. Using a bitmap compare option
also allows you to minutely compare two fonts to ensure that they are different
from each other e.g. to see if Bodoni BT is easily distinguished from Bodoni
Bd BT.This test also allows you to check the spacing in multiglyph characters.
To run the test choose the Tests option from the GXWaterfall
menu bar and then select the Compare Fonts(QD) menu item.This will bring
up a dialog box like the following
This dialog box allows you to choose which two fonts are
to be compared by clicking on each pop-up menu bar and selecting a font.A
bitmap display check box may also be checked so that bitmap images of the
two fonts will be displayed for comparison.Once the two fonts have been
chosen then click on the OK button to run the test.This produces a character
by character listing of the differences in advance widths between corresponding
characters in each font.See Example
Test Cases for an example of the results produced by this test.
The
Compare Fonts(GX) test
The Compare Fonts(GX) test works in a similar manner to
the Compare Fonts(QD) test but uses QDGX metrics rather than the QuickDraw
metrics of the latter.The major difference between the two is that the Compare
Fonts(GX) test compares glyphs and not characters as in the Compare Fonts(QD)
test.This is important because the display ordering in the Compare Fonts(GX)
test will be different and possibly run up to 64 thousand glyphs per font..See
Example Test Cases for an
example of the results produced by the Compare Fonts(GX) test.
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