laser-lovers@uw-beaver (04/30/85)
From: Brian Reid <reid@Glacier> First I'd like to suggest that the list sidestep the comment from the Xerox summer student and ask somebody at Xerox to show him the back messages from this distribution--we've had this discussion before. Second, I'd like to comment on Les Earnest's recent comment that "The LaserWriter does character spacing wrong", and also on Henry Spencer's comment (not quoted exactly but paraphrased from my memory) that "HP LaserJet default character widths are all wrong, so I have to place each character individually with my software. LaserWriter spacings are all wrong and therefore LaserWriters are bad". What many of you who have grown up with more rigid laser printer systems seem to be misunderstanding is that you don't have to live with the defaults if you don't like them. Almost everything that the LaserWriter does can be changed, easily, by users or by programmers writing software to generate output for it. Sure, there is a default behavior, and the default behavior is what the folks at Adobe think you should be doing. But if you don't like the default behavior, you can change it easily. By "easily", I mean you don't have to go doing stuff like individually positioning every character to ignore the widths information. If you want to use different font shapes for different point sizes, the just load 'em in and use 'em. If you want to use bit-tuned rasters, then load them in the same way you would load them in to any other brand of laser printer. If you want to change the width data for a font, then just download a vector of 256 numbers and rewrite the width vector for that font (the rewrite will be undone when your job finishes printing, of course, unless it is done by the system manager, in which case it will stick around between jobs). If you want to write your own kerning procedure and have it called after every character to look around and adjust spacing according to the pixel resolution of the current machine and the identity of the next character, then go for it! In summary, the LaserWriter is engineered to do one thing by default, trusting that the majority of the world (not composed of font maniacs) will be happy with that. However, it is also engineered so that people who ARE font maniacs can adjust its behavior to suit their beliefs as to the "right thing" to do. And nobody has to resort to individual positioning of characters in order to achieve those things, unless they want to. Hey, it's a free country. Since there is at least one new reader of L.L., I should repeat my disclaimer that in what passes for my spare time I am a paid consultant to Adobe Systems, who were involved in the design of the LaserWriter. However, nothing I say in this forum is ever approved by them, and they don't even see it until it goes out on the list. Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (05/02/85)
From: ihnp4!utzoo!henry@uw-beaver.arpa > ... Henry Spencer's > comment (not quoted exactly but paraphrased from my memory) that "HP > LaserJet default character widths are all wrong, so I have to place > each character individually with my software. LaserWriter spacings are > all wrong and therefore LaserWriters are bad". > [Brian then points out that LaserWriter software could juggle spacing > in about the same way.] Guilty, for the most part, with one small reservation: from the viewpoint of someone who merely wants his output typeset, there is a large difference between "the software could do X" and "the software does do X". Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry