Well, as it is all legal, I can spill the beans:
I went so far as to extract the Espy Sans bitmaps from the 7.5 Apple Guide yesterday, using Resedit, and I also went so far as to open them up in a version of Fontographer that I have installed on a Quadra, which was an interesting exercise.
However, so far as I can see, there is no way of automatically creating outlines from bitmaps in Fontographer (or at least in the version of it that I have), it being necessary instead to outline the things first (whether by hand or by pasting in something like EPS data for each letter), and then to go through the business of manipulating the resulting bezier curves, etc. Without the outlines (the "real" shapes of the letters), there is not much you can do with the software. Bitmaps can be generated from outlines (and metrics and such), but not vice versa. I got as far as generating more bitmapped sizes for screen use, which worked fine up to a point, until then, as I said, I did some research and found an elegant, alternative, ready-made solution from Mr. Gates et al. I don't think the further Fontographer magic required is going to happen at this end.
For printing purposes, I would not be inclined to use any of the typefaces mentioned, as there are better tools available. Almost all fonts, in fact, are designed for print, and there they do what they do best, but the beauty of Georgia and Verdana is that they were designed from day one for screens, and not just any screens, but the kind of screens we hooked up to our Macs around 1994. I wish I had known about them back then, as it would have saved my eyes a fair deal of wear and tear!
EDIT: According to Wikipedia, I see that the release date is more like 1996.
I went so far as to extract the Espy Sans bitmaps from the 7.5 Apple Guide yesterday, using Resedit, and I also went so far as to open them up in a version of Fontographer that I have installed on a Quadra, which was an interesting exercise.
However, so far as I can see, there is no way of automatically creating outlines from bitmaps in Fontographer (or at least in the version of it that I have), it being necessary instead to outline the things first (whether by hand or by pasting in something like EPS data for each letter), and then to go through the business of manipulating the resulting bezier curves, etc. Without the outlines (the "real" shapes of the letters), there is not much you can do with the software. Bitmaps can be generated from outlines (and metrics and such), but not vice versa. I got as far as generating more bitmapped sizes for screen use, which worked fine up to a point, until then, as I said, I did some research and found an elegant, alternative, ready-made solution from Mr. Gates et al. I don't think the further Fontographer magic required is going to happen at this end.
For printing purposes, I would not be inclined to use any of the typefaces mentioned, as there are better tools available. Almost all fonts, in fact, are designed for print, and there they do what they do best, but the beauty of Georgia and Verdana is that they were designed from day one for screens, and not just any screens, but the kind of screens we hooked up to our Macs around 1994. I wish I had known about them back then, as it would have saved my eyes a fair deal of wear and tear!
EDIT: According to Wikipedia, I see that the release date is more like 1996.