Whacking some typefaces

I almost forgot to mention one of the most enjoyable accomplishments in my computer life that took place some days ago. I was designing a site for a friend and needed a certain typeface (aka font). To be honest, I needed a special version of the font in a foreign language, one written in none latin characters.

Not being able to find the font anywhere on p2p engines (emule, torrents etc), I discovered a site using swf (ShockWaveFlash) for previewing custom texts in and many other highly interesting fonts. I imagined and was correct that the swf would contain the entire alphabet in this font as it needed to preview any input.

Doing some simple tricks to bypass the asp "?" redirection, I ended up with the url of the source swf containing the font. The swf existed but could not be viewed in firefox nor IE, it gave an 404 "page not found error", misleading me that the file didn't exist. Something mysterious was happening. So I went to my DAP Premium and pasted the swf's url... bingo! The file saves down to my hard drive in a sec.

Now I was left with a swf containing the font i needed but had to find a way to extract it. After countless installations and trials of swf rippers/decompilers/extractors I realized there was no option for me to save the embedded font as ttf (only as swf or fla - no use). Reading various forums, I found out that only ONE program was supposedly able to do this: Action Script Viewer version 4.04 or later.

So, what could be easier, I thought, than find this program and start ripping. Not so fast. The p2p shared versions of this program where no later than 4.01, except a 4.06 version that missed a couple of vital dll's...

After 2-days search I convinced myself ASV could not be found for free. So I decided to proceed with one of my rarest -if any- moves... purchase the program! I am into computers for as long as I can remember myself (started with a Sinclair Spectrum ZX+) and I can proudly proclaim that I have actually bought only one software throughout the years: Deejaysystem MK-I

So, after overcoming some initial hesitations, I placed an online order for ASV. I would get the latest version 4.084. Note: By this time I really was not yet sure whether ASV did what it promised and I was looking for, as I had not tried it. Me ordering a 60$ worth program without knowing exactly its functionality, imagine how much I needed the font...

Well, if you have reached this far my story must be interesting to you. Next thing the online credit card verification system declines my card which -btw- is very ok. What do I do? Give up at this point? No, I email the seller explaining the problem. They reply back within an hour! That was prompt for my standards which have lowered enough lately: I expected an automated response that my case will be examined soon, a second automated message a day later that they still examine my case, and a useless answer after a couple of days of the type "please verify that you have entered you credit card information correctly".

Anyway, to make a long story short (!?!?) they fix my problem and within an hour I get the software emailed to me! Not only that, I receive an extra personalized (!) email by the program maker with my password file and a dll needed for it to run (YES! I own ASV40U.DLL!). Wow! Thank you!

I was so impatient, the time it took me to unzip and install the program was less than a minute. Could not wait to test it. So, loaded the swf in my own, registered ASV, and went File > Extract Resources > Save all fonts as TTF...



ASV 4.084 


... GO!

Some progress bar appeared and disappeared quickly. Browsed back to the folder and the TTF was there!!! Opened it in character map and YES! YES! YES! - all international characters were there!!!!

Next thing, copied the fonts to the windows/fonts folder and opened Word to try and type something in the foreign language using that font. Disappointment. It wouldn't display the international characters.

At this point I was pissed and stubborn enough not to let myself give up. Opened Fontlab (first time I used it), loaded the font and realized that the characters were there but were set as extra symbols and not as language encoding so Word could not render them. After spending a couple of hours in the mysterious worlds of glyph editing and encoding, I managed to set the extra characters as specific language-encoding characters. Saved the font, installed it again and back to Word. Started typing in foreign characters... everything OK!

MORAL LESSONS:
- ASV is well worth bying!
- Congratulations Burak!
- Fonts sites should be very wary nowadays...

Near miss...

This morning I payed a quicky "in-and-out" visit to the lottery store near my house (that's the nice thing about smaller cities - you still can enjoy the concept of living in a neighborhood) to pay the electricity bill and check the results of the 22nd National Lottery. Well, hear this. My token was numbered 11050. The winning number was 11053. Porca fortuna...

Talking about neighbors, just as I exited the store, my friend Mimi from the fish store next door (who thinks of me as a computer expert) asked me if there is anything that he can do to get rid of a spam/spyware dialer that keeps charging his and his cousin's phone bill with an extra 150 euros per month for calls to trash numbers. Of course Ad-aware is what he needs but he got confused even by me mentioning the name. I promised I will d/l a copy of the program and provide him a cd with it. The dialers can now go sleep with the fishes...

Never hate your enemies...

... It effects your judgement.