eriks@yetti.UUCP (Eriks Rugelis) (10/28/86)
imagine a tiny voice in the TeX wilderness calling.... help!
i am more than a little confused about the new .gf font format
that in my understanding is meant to supersede the older .pxl
format; i have seen several people post to the net stating that
the .gf fonts are supposed to occupy less space than .pxl fonts
that sounded real fine to us until we started cranking our newly
received computer modern .mf's through metafont... we were confronted
with .gf files that are an order of magnitude larger(!!) than their
corresponding .pxl's
e.g. cmr9 from the 1000 sub-directory
.pxl 19 512 byte disk blocks
.gf 240 disk blocks
so ok... did we do something terrible to the .mf's that we got from
maria code? does maria code deliver .mf's that need doctoring before
we use them?
we are targetting a 300 dpi canon type laser box and are first of
all concerned with doing this on vax/vms although we will be installing
TeX on our sun 3's as well
signed... keep the money! send more disk space!!
--
Voice: Eriks Rugelis
Ma Bell: 416/736-5257 x.2688
Electronic: {allegra|decvax|ihnp4|linus}!utzoo!yetti!eriks.UUCP
or eriks@yulibra.BITNETchris@umcp-cs.UUCP (Chris Torek) (11/02/86)
In article <431@yetti.UUCP> eriks@yetti.UUCP (Eriks Rugelis) writes: >i am more than a little confused about the new .gf font format >that in my understanding is meant to supersede the older .pxl >format; i have seen several people post to the net stating that >the .gf fonts are supposed to occupy less space than .pxl fonts Often; not always. GF files are essentially run-length encodings of the pixellation of some font at a particular resolution. >e.g. cmr9 from the 1000 sub-directory > .pxl 19 512 byte disk blocks > .gf 240 disk blocks Something is definitely wrong here: % cd /usr/local/lib/tex/fonts % cd cmr9; ls -l cmr9.300gf -rw-r--r-- 1 bin 11820 Oct 19 12:24 cmr9.300gf % cd amr9; ls -l amr9.1500pxl -rw-r--r-- 1 bin 13588 Mar 22 1986 amr9.1500pxl Amr9 and cmr9 are obviously not the same font, but you can see that in this case, the GF and PXL files are nearly the same size. Note that cmr9.300gf and cmr9.1500pxl represent the same density (300 dpi), even though one sounds five times bigger. If you want to save disk space, use the `PK' font format. It is also easier to interpret than GF format; one blunder in the GF format complicates things unnecessarily. -- In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7690) UUCP: seismo!umcp-cs!chris CSNet: chris@umcp-cs ARPA: chris@mimsy.umd.edu