_____________________________.·.
- What are OIM | F.A.T.E Fonts?


OIM or *.oim stands for (Orbit Industries Macro) template file.
- These files are a required resource for our program (F.A.T.E) to operate.


To explain, in the early 90's, a group of people came up with the idea of using
text letters to make text art. They used a standard arial font format for the art
and used programs like notepad to create their own ascii art. The phenomena spread
and millions of people started creating and sharing their ascii art macros and
ascii letter fonts. These ascii font art styles now make up the bulk of the ascii
letter fonts you see in the font list for (F.A.T.E). The fonts are created with
monospaced text, and in most cases they should look good in any size and font format.
If you want to create your own *.oim font, you will have to wait a little while.
Software will be released enabling artists to create ascii scripts in *.oim format.



______________________________________.·.
- What is the OIM | F.A.T.E Font Format?

|¦|NOTE:	- The first five characters in the entire file must be "oim2a".
|¦|		- This header line will tell F.A.T.E how to read the file.
|¦|Example:	oim2a$ 6 5 20 15 3 0 143 229

OIM or *.oim font template file format:
        oim2a$ 6 5 20 15 3 0 143 229
          |  | | | |  |  | |  |   |
         /  /  | | |  |  | |  |   \
Signature  /  /  | |  |  | |   \   Codetag_Count
  Hardblank  /  /  |  |  |  \   Full_Layout*
       Height  /   |  |   \  Print_Direction
       Baseline   /    \   Comment_Lines
        Max_Length      Old_Layout*



_________________________________________________.·.
- What is "Character Width" and "Character Height"?

These apply to OIM fonts only. OIM fonts can be designed to allow characters to
overlap or be "smushed" together. The font template designer allows control of the type
and level of letter overlapping. You can override the fonts default design by changing
the settings for "Character Width" and "Character Height".

Below is a description of the various choices.
|¦|"Full" - No character overlap.
|¦|"Fitted" - Characters are moved toward each other until they almost touch.
|¦|"Smush (U)" - Universal Smushing. Smushing moves two characters toward each other
until their edges overlap by one character.
In |universal smushing, the latter character's edge overrides the former's edge.
|¦|"Smush (R)" - Rule-Based Smushing.
Similar to Universal Smushing except the smushing is based on a set of rules
(5 for vertical, 6 for horizontal). These rules allow font authors more control over
how their letters are smushed. When you select this option from the dropdown,
it turns on all possible smushing rules. Font authors can pick and chose which rules to
turn on or off, so this option may produce different results than the "Default"
option if the font author has chosen to use Rule-Based Smushing.
|¦|"Default" - The character overlap the font author originally intended for the font.



____________________.·.
- What are AOL Macros?

AOL Macros:
In the late 90's, little hacking programs known as "proggies"
became popular in the underground warez scene of AOL. examples: (AOHell and Fate-X).
As these programs became more popular, many begain to feature "Macro Shops", which
were ascii art development areas. The user could develop their own ascii art and then
scroll the text in an AOL chat room. Most "Macro Shops" included a feature that allowed
the user to type in a large text area. These fonts have no connection to F.A.T.E fonts,
and since they were developed for AOL, they were made for point size 10 in the format of
the Arial font (which AOL used at the time). This was a non-monospaced environment, the
ascii art was hard to create and didn't look good outside AOL. Back in the day I always
thought these fonts showed a remarkable amount of artistic talent and effort.
They where what inspired me to write (F.A.T.E) and all it's ascii art fonts.



___________________________________________________________.·.
- Didn't this used to be called a "Text ascii art generator"?

Yes. Sort of...
Originally Fate was the first name given to this project, in homage.
As the project developed more the name seemed to fit way better than expected.
It's a "functional editor" & it makes "artistic text". = functional.artistic.text.editor.
While coding up to version 2.0, the project was renamed to capitalize the "F.A.T.E" part.



      

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O.I - 2032