laser-lovers@uw-beaver (02/10/85)
From: Richard Furuta <Furuta@WASHINGTON.ARPA>
This message is redirected to laser-lovers from info-mac. Much of the
past few day's comments on the LaserWriter have centered on font issues.
I'd be interested if Adobe would consider commenting on these matters.
--Rick
---------------
Mail-From: FURUTA created at 31-Jan-85 00:41:32
Date: Thu 31 Jan 85 00:41:32-PST
From: Richard Furuta <Furuta@WASHINGTON.ARPA>
Subject: Re: Latest Macworld
To: G.ZEEP%MIT-EECS@MIT-MC.ARPA, info-mac@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA
cc: Furuta@WASHINGTON.ARPA
In-Reply-To: Message from "Wang Zeep <G.ZEEP%MIT-EECS@MIT-MC.ARPA>" of Wed 30 Jan 85 23:43:36-PST
I just got a copy of Macworld and took a look at their articles on the
LaserWriter. I was quite disappointed in the articles themselves,
because they fail to tell me much about the printer they describe.
For one, they don't seem to have many decent examples of what the
print actually looks like at any place in the article. For another,
many of the examples of LaserWriter output seem to have been reduced
in size during production---clearly unacceptable to anyone who wants
to figure out what the output actually looks like. Second, I had the
very strong impression that some of the examples were damaged in
production. There are some rather strange gouges in the Bold Roman on
page 46, the "A" in the Bold Oblique has a rather strong look of "I've
been cut by an X-Acto knife," and the Infinity Circle on page 109
looks much blotchier than I've seen on proof sheets from other
sources. I think that the LaserWriter review's Figure 9, talking
about Mac screen counterparts to the built in fonts, was just wrongly
set up and results up many misconceptions. For example, G.ZEEP@EECS
says (in info-mac):
Notice the abominable screen versions of many of the built-in printer
fonts. This is why Mac fonts are stored as rasters -- more "efficient"
techniques usually blow up at 72 dpi (many blow up at 300 dpi -- read
Byte from last month or so).
Well, dang it, the Mac screen fonts >>are<< bitmaps and my
understanding is that these were hand tuned a little as well. The
LaserWriter review article goes into some rationalization about
"because of the great difference in resolution between LaserWriter
printing and the Macintosh screen display, some LaserWriter fonts look
fuzzy on the Mac screen." More likely an explanation for the odd
quality at some of the sizes is that the requested size wasn't
provided in the System file and the Mac went off and used it's only
partially successful font scaling algorithm to create them. This is
pretty much supported by an earlier statement in the article saying
"of the font sizes available in MacWrite, only the 9-, 12-, 18-, and
24-point fonts are tuned to look the same size on the screen as when
printed by the LaserWriter." Based on the example figure, it looks to
me that for most of the faces, the only one really on the reviewer's
computer was the 12-point. Notice the strong difference in quality
between the 18-point times roman screen font in Figures 8 and 9.
--Rick
-------
-------