laser-lovers@uw-beaver (05/12/85)
From: Brian Reid <reid@Glacier> Paul Rubin at Berkeley sent out a message containing this paragraph. I'm sure that most of you on the net are sick of hearing it, but evidently Paul (at least) didn't understand. He says: > The body type is extremely crisp and clear, but the intercharacter > spacing is uneven and sloppy-looking. This is probably as much the > fault of the formatting software as the fonts themselves. The fonts, > in my opinion, look okay but not great. This has nothing to do with the LaserWriter. Despite what employees and stockholders of competing companies have said on this list, there is nothing wrong with the intercharacter spacing on the LaserWriter. Perhaps what is wrong is that the LaserWriter gives application programs so much power to control things, and the author or user of this particular application program did the formatting with the incorrect width information. You will often see strange spacing on documents that were produced with Macintosh software that predates the LaserWriter--such as early MacWrite--because they are formatting the page believing that it is going to get printed on an ImageWriter, which has very different resolution and very different fonts. > Because the type is so clear, > I suspect that the people at the newspaper did their laser typesetting > in a very large point size and the photo-reduced it somehow. That > would be supported by earlier claims on this list that the Postscript > software in the Laserwriter does well at "normal" sizes (10, 12, etc.) > but loses when the characters have to be scaled up or down by very > much. No, the type is so clear because the LaserWriter prints in beautiful clear type. I'm sure they did it life size. I am guessing that you must have believed what you read on the net, but not completely understood it. Nobody, not even Imagen stockholders, ever said that PostScript "loses when the characters have to be scaled .... up by very much". First, the characters are not scaled up or down, because the master copy does not exist in any particular size. The truth is that regardless of whether or not you like the way the PostScript fonts are spaced, the quality of the spacing improves as the letters get bigger because the device resolution is finer with respect to the character size as that size gets bigger. Since I haven't really had any takers on my idea to distribute copies of laser printer output in a national publication and let people decide for themselves whether the spacing is good or bad, I would like to make another offer. I will mail a few sheets of ordinary LaserWriter output, formatted with my Scribe program, to anybody who sends me a stamped self-addressed envelope. This output will not attempt to show off the whizbang graphics capability of PostScript (which nobody at all has challenged) but will just be ordinary text, in a variety of sizes, from which you can see what the PostScript character spacing looks like. If you are interested, mail to: Prof. Brian K. Reid Stanford University Computer Systems Laboratory Stanford, CA 94305 [Customary disclaimer: I am a paid consultant to Adobe Systems, designers of PostScript.] [Noncustomary claimer: I have a LaserWriter at home, which I bought with many thousands of dollars of my own hard-earned money; I did not receive any form of discount from Apple, Adobe, or anybody else on this printer. I bought it at BusinessLand with a mixture of personal check and American Express, and I bought it because I think it is the best darn printer money can buy. At this point I am jumping to the defense of the LaserWriter not because of my Adobe connection, but because I am the happy and proud owner of one of these wonderful machines and I feel slightly evangelistic about them. Don't you know any BMW owners who get jumpy whenever anybody says anything false and derogatory about their beloved automobiles?]